HOUSTON & SANTA FE, NM (By James C. McKinley Jr., NYT) March 1, 2011 — A phenomenal surge in Hispanics has fueled the population growth in Texas, which gained more people over the last decade than any other state, according to United States Census Bureau recent figures.

People who identify themselves as Hispanic accounted for two-thirds of the state’s growth in the last decade.

Hispanics now make up 38 percent of the state’s 25.1 million people, up from 32 percent a decade ago.

At the same time, demographers say, the growth in the population of white people who are not Hispanic has slowed markedly, rising by only 4 percent. Non-Hispanic whites now make up just 45 percent of the Texas population, down from 52 percent in 2000. Blacks continue to be about 11 percent of the state’s population.

“It’s not just a sea change, it’s a tipping point,” said State Senator Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio, where about two-thirds of the residents are Hispanic. “San Antonio looks like what Texas is going to look like in 15 years.”

Steve H. Murdock, a former director of the United States Census Bureau who is now a sociology professor at Rice University in Houston, said most of the growth among Hispanics stemmed from births to families already living here.

Still, migration played a big role, not just from Latin America, but from other states as well. Since 2000, Texas’s population has surged 20.6 percent, or by 4.2 million people, and nearly 45 percent of that growth was from migration, said the state’s demographer, Lloyd B. Potter.

The detailed data released on Thursday will be used to redraw districts for Congress and the State Legislature. Texas is picking up four Congressional seats. “Most of the new population that drives the four additional seats is Hispanic, but in the Texas state government the people who draw the boundaries are all Republicans,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The fastest-growing counties are in the suburban zones around Houston and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where rural towns have been turned into suburbs to create sprawling metropolises.

The corridor between Austin and San Antonio also grew dramatically, as did the string of counties along the Rio Grande, anchored by the cities of Brownsville and McAllen near the Gulf Coast. Many of the rural counties in West Texas lost population, and farming communities there continued to decline.

Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s largest, grew by 20 percent and is home to 1.7 million Hispanics — 41 percent of the county population.

Many politicians in Austin expect the Legislature to carve out two new districts from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A third district is likely to be created among the suburbs southwest of Houston. The final district is expected to be in the Rio Grande Valley.