By NANCY COOK LAUER
By NANCY COOK LAUER
Stephens Media
Hawaii County leads the nation in the highest percentage of its population — 33.8 percent — claiming Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander bloodlines.
But data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau seem to show a growing movement of Pacific peoples away from Hawaii and toward the U.S. West and South.
Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders living in Hawaii grew by 25.9 percent between 2000 and 2010, compared to 40 percent nationwide. Nevada’s Pacific population grew 102.3 percent and Alaska’s grew 102.2 percent.
More than half of those claiming Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander blood live in Hawaii (356,000) or California (286,000).
But pockets of Pacific Islanders in counties in the West and South showed much higher growth levels, based on smaller population bases. Thirty-nine counties experienced growth of 200 percent or more, 146 counties saw growth of 100 percent to 199.9 percent and 237 counties saw growth between 50 percent and 99.9 percent.
Counties seeing such growth are in northern Georgia and Alabama and into Tennessee, as well as parts of Maryland and Virginia around Washington D.C. There are also population clusters growing near the Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio metropolitan areas in Texas and in many counties in Florida.
It’s too early to tell if the mainland population booms are because of migration or burgeoning families of residents already living on the mainland, said Hawaii’s Chief State Economist Eugene Tian, who tracks census data. He said the Census Bureau is expected to release out-of-state migration data in the next few months.
“There’s still a piece of the puzzle missing,” Tian said. “The new data still doesn’t show the whole picture.”
The data, released during a webcast news conference, also show more than half the population in this category report multiple races. The group, which includes Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and people claiming origins in any of the original peoples of Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, surpassed 1.2 million people, with its 44 percent growth rate making it one of the fastest growing multiracial groups in the nation over the past decade. Still, the category accounts for only 0.4 percent of all people in the United States.
The 527,077 Native Hawaiians are the largest component of the category, followed by Samoans and Guamanian or Chamorro population. But Native Hawaiians haven’t been growing at as fast a rate as other Pacific Islanders, according to the data. This caused the Native Hawaiian share in the category to decline from 46 percent in 200 to 43 percent in 2010.
Other categories of Pacific Islanders growing more swiftly were Guamanian or Chamorro, whose share of the category grew from 11 percent to 12 percent; the Marshallese, whose population tripled in size over the decade to more than 22,000 and Fijians, who grew by almost 19,000 people.
“Sadly, keiki o ka aina from all backgrounds struggle to stay in Hawaii due to the high cost of living. But Native Hawaiians have had it especially hard, due to the loss of their culture, land and way of life following the overthrow,” said Jesse Broder van Dyke, spokesman for Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii. “Sen. Akaka believes that Native Hawaiians deserve the same opportunity to come together and chart their future that our nation has granted to American Indians and Alaska Natives through a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Native Hawaiians deserve the right to perpetuate their culture in their only homeland.”
Email Nancy Cook Lauer at ncook-lauer@westhawaiitoday.com.