Forecast Says Gwinnett Will Be 37 Percent Hispanic By 2040
Chip Harlan / flickr.com/chippenziedeutch
Gwinnett County’s population will be more than a third Hispanic by 2040, according to recent forecasts by the Atlanta Regional Commission, a regional planning and intergovernmental agency.
Census figures show the county’s Hispanic population now is around 20 percent, but the commission projects that will rise to about 37 percent.
“They’ve had a strong presence of Hispanics and other races and ethnicities for quite a while, and what we’re forecasting is essentially the continuation of those trends,” said Mike Carnathan, a researcher with the Atlanta Regional Commission.
But Andrew Beveridge, a demographer and professor of sociology at Queens College in New York, said while numbers like birth and death rates are easy to track, immigration trends can be hard to predict because of a number of factors, including politics.
“It’s really front and center to the current election, which is basically kind of slamming the door on a certain amount of immigration,” Beveridge said. “So if that happened, it might upset this estimate.”
Beveridge said the projection could also change depending on the economic situation in the U.S. and the countries from which people are immigrating.
The Atlanta Regional Commission predicts the Hispanic population in metro Atlanta overall will grow by more than 1 million people by 2040.
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