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According to Lavanya Ramanathan:
That future may not be far off. Whatever forces are working to erect walls and negate travel documents may be too late to change what is underway: Immigration and birthrate trends suggest that by 2046, the United States will be made up of more non-whites than whites.
Is this true?
Lavanya Ramanathan is using a definition of "white" that is contrary to the US definition.
This can be seen by a more-complete quotation:
Immigration and birthrate trends suggest that by 2046, the United States will be made up of more non-whites than whites. And the change will be fueled in part by immigrants from Latin and South America, from Asia and Mideast nations, but also by their American-born children and grandchildren.
Oppositely, the United States defines white as:
White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa
The "Middle East" is defined in immigration law as ending at the Pakistan western border.
By self-report, in 2010, 26.7 million out of 50.5 million Hispanics considered themselves "white alone" and another 2.4 million consider themselves white in combination with another race.
The US definition of "Hispanic" is:
“Hispanic or Latino” refers to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.
A much more accurate article on this topic is the New York Times article The Myth of a White Minority which links to actual data and says:
In March [2015], it projected that non-Hispanic whites would be a minority by 2044
...
The predictions make sense only if you accept the outdated, illogical methods used by the census, which define as a “minority” anyone who belongs to “any group other than non-Hispanic White alone.”
So Ramanathan should have said "less than 50% non-Hispanic white-alone persons" instead of "more non-whites than whites", used 2044 not 2046, and linked to a data source.
The source for the 2046 number is the Census Bureau in 2013.
Here is a AP report summarizing it:
Without increased immigration, whites would lose their U.S. majority in 2046 [...]
The 2046 estimate of a white minority is one of three new alternative projections based on rates for births and deaths and a scenario in which immigration follows its recent slower pace of adding more than 700,000 foreigners each year. [...]
The actual shift in demographics will be influenced by factors that can't accurately be forecast. They include the pace of the economic recovery, cultural changes, natural or manmade disasters, as well as any overhaul of immigration laws based on legislation now being debated in Congress.
Note that both the AP and Ramanathan use the term "white", while the bureau talks about "majority-minority", meaning "non-Hispanic single-race white".
The method used by the Census Bureau has been criticized by the New York Times for this usage of minority/white as it excludes people who would self-identify as white:
The predictions make sense only if you accept the outdated, illogical methods used by the census, which define as a “minority” anyone who belongs to “any group other than non-Hispanic White alone.” In the words “group” and “alone” lie a host of confusions. [...] The “one drop” rule was absurd, of course, yet it has effectively returned, with a vengeance, via statistical categories. There is no justification for viewing as not white all children who are partly white and being raised in a family that includes a white parent and two white grandparents, to say nothing of aunts, uncles and cousins.
The author - sociologist Richard Alba - goes into a bit more depth about the one-drop rule used by the Bureau which treats some self-identified white people as minority and the possibility of changing definitions of whiteness in a separate article.
