Demographics
The United States Census Bureau estimates that the population of Arizona was 6,482,505 on July 1, 2011, a 1.42% increase since the 2010 United States Census.
Arizona remained sparsely settled for most of the 19th century. The 1860 census reported the population of “Arizona County” to be 6,482, of whom 4,040 were listed as “Indians”, 21 as “free colored” and 2,421 as “white”. In 1980, the Census Bureau reported Arizona's population as 16.2% Hispanic, 5.6% Native American, and 74.5% non-Hispanic white. Arizona’s continued population growth puts an enormous stress on the state’s water supply. As of 2011, 61.3% of Arizona's children under the age of 1 belonged to minority groups.
The population of metropolitan Phoenix increased by 45.3% from 1991 through 2001, helping to make Arizona the second fastest growing state in the U.S. in the 1990s (the fastest was Nevada). As of January 2012, the population of the Phoenix area is estimated to be over 4.3 million.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Arizona had a population of 6,392,017. In terms of race and ethnicity, the state was 73.0% White (57.8% Non-Hispanic White Alone), 4.1% Black or African American, 4.6% Native American and Alaska Native, 2.8% Asian, 0.2% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, 11.9% from Some Other Race, and 3.4% from Two or More Races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race made up 29.6% of the state’s population.
Arizona’s five largest ancestry groups, as of 2009, were:
- Mexican (27.4%);
- German (16.0%);
- Irish (10.8%);
- English (10.1%);
- Italian (4.6%).
Arizona is home to the largest number of speakers of Native American languages in the 48 contiguous states, with over 85,000 individuals speaking Navajo, and 10,403 persons reporting Apache as the language spoken at home in 2005. Arizona’s Apache County has the highest concentration of speakers of Native American Indian languages in the United States.
In 2010, illegal immigrants constituted an estimated 7.9% of the population. This was the second highest percentage of any state in the U.S.
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