William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings, produces data showing that the U.S. is fast approaching the point where minorities outnumber whites. But that’s good news, according to the liberal thinktank, which titles his comments, “Building a Stronger More Inclusive Nation”:

What it means to the nation is good news. The good news is that we were always expecting this aging white popultation to grow very slowly and then decline. But the good news is that we have this younger minority population that is really the bulwark of our population growth. It’s going to be the mainstay of the growth in our labor force, especially over the next 20 years when we have a lot of white baby boomers retiring…. If we didn’t have that minority growth which is a result in large degree of the immigration that we’ve had over the last 20 or 30 years, the children and second and third generation of a lot of those immigrants, we would be in a situation like a lot of Europe is where they actually have a declining labor force population…It’s the younger minorities that are helping us stay afloat, so as I say it’s good news.

Now consider Bill Clinton’s comments in Israel last week during the fete for Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday:

If it was “okay with you” to have a majority of people denied the vote in an expanded Israel, so be it, he said, but “would you be a democracy?” And “if you let them [the Palestinians] vote, would you be a Jewish state?” he asked rhetorically.

“The longer the Palestinian conflict remained unsolved,” he said, “the more acute the demographic challenge would become for Israel. […] No matter how many settlers you put out there, the Palestinians are having more babies than the Israelis as a whole… You’ve got an existential question to answer.”

When Obama was in Israel, he described similar threats:

You can be the generation that permanently secures the Zionist dream, or you can face a growing challenge to its future. Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.

(Yousef Munayyer was ahead of me here.)