Washington — A portrait of an increasingly diverse America emerged Thursday from the first official release of Census 2000 data as hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of the opportunity to identify themselves as members of more than one race.
The data, made available first to New Jersey, Mississippi, Virginia and Wisconsin, also confirmed forecasts of explosive growth in the Asian and Hispanic population, especially in the biggest and fastest-growing counties.
"We're on our way to becoming a country literally made up of every other nation in the world," said social scientist Kenneth Prewitt, former head of the Census Bureau.
The figures documented trends long predicted, depicting an increasingly diverse society as the new century dawned.
Among the revelations:
l New Jersey saw its Asian population soar at least 77 percent over the last 10 years, from 270,839 in 1990 to at least 480,276 in 2000.
l The population increased by 14 percent in Virginia, to nearly 7.1 million. But that was dwarfed by the Hispanic growth rate in Loudoun County, Va., in the outer suburbs of the nation's capital. The number of Hispanics there skyrocketed by 368 percent over the decade, to 10,089.
l In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County recorded a slight 2 percent decrease in population from the 1990 head count, 940,164. But it's Hispanic population shot up by 84 percent, to 82,406.
l The black population in Mississippi increased at least 13 percent, to just over 1 million.
Direct comparisons of figures for 1990 and 2000 were impossible, however, because people previously could choose from only five racial categories compared to 63 in the latest census.
The figures were based on the initial count of the population, approved by the Bush administration. Democrats and civil rights advocates criticized the decision, contending that statistically adjusting the raw figures could have protected against traditional undercounts of minorities, the poor and children.
State lawmakers will use the long-awaited data to reshape congressional, state, and local legislative district boundaries. The figures also will be used to redistribute over $185 billion a year in federal money among states and communities.
Because of changes in federal guidelines for collecting statistics on race and ethnicity, Census 2000 was the first which allowed people to "mark one or more races."
The release of the figures to the four states Thursday was the first in a series of reports the Census Bureau will make public throughout March.
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