Elderly are projected to outnumber children by 2035 for the first time in U.S. history, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday.
The report found that all baby boomers will be older than 65 by 2030, which means that one in every five residents will be at retirement age in just over a decade.
By 2035 there will be 78.0 million people older than 65 years, while there will be 76.4 million under the age of 18, explained Jonathan Vespa, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau.
Birth and immigration trends will also affect the country's diversity, with the number of whites shrinking by 2024, The Wall Street Journal noted.
By 2045 this group could drop below half the population and by 2020 the number of non-Hispanic whites under the age of 18 will fall to less than half.
The Bureau noted that, while there are likely to be four times more births occurring in the next few years, as the population ages, a rising number of deaths would ultimately alter the population growth.
Populations will continue to grow, but this will stem from immigration rates, something which William Frey of the Brookings Institution said the U.S. should be grateful for.
"This is a country that should be grateful for all the immigration it's had over the last 25 years," he said, according to The Blaze. "These projections put even more of an exclamation point on it."
While the demographic shift may be developing in the U.S., it is a trend well underway in other areas such as Japan and Europe, Bloomberg noted.
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