Kamala Harris, daughter of immigrants, is the face of America's demographic shift

When Kamala Harris' mother left India for California in 1958, the percentage of Americans who were immigrants was at its lowest point in over a century.

That was about to change.

Her arrival at Berkeley as a young graduate student — and that of another student, an immigrant from Jamaica whom she would marry — was the beginning of a historic wave of immigration from outside Europe that would transform the United States. Now the American-born children of these immigrants — people like Harris — are the face of this country's demographic future.

Joe Biden's choice of Harris as his running mate has been celebrated as a milestone because she is the first Black woman and the first person of Indian descent in American history to be on a major party's presidential ticket. But her selection also highlights a remarkable shift in this country: the rise of a new wave of children of immigrants, or second-generation Americans, as a growing political and cultural force.

The last major influx of immigrants, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, came primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe. This time the surge comes from around the world.

In California, the state where Harris grew up and which she now represents in the Senate, about half of all children come from immigrant homes. Nationwide, for the first time in this country's history, white people make up less than half the population under the age of 16, the Brookings Institution has found; the trend is driven by larger numbers of Asians, Hispanics and people who are multiracial.

Today, more than one-quarter of American adults are immigrants or the American-born children of immigrants. About 25 million adults are American-born children of immigrants, representing about 10% of the adult population, according to Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center. By comparison, the foreign-born portion of the population is still much larger — about 42 million adults, or roughly 1 in 6 of the country's 250 million adults, Passel noted.

At 55, Harris is on the older side of this second generation of Americans whose parents came in those early years. But her family is part of a larger trend that has broad implications for the country's identity, transforming a mostly white baby-boomer society into a multiethnic and racial patchwork.

There were only about 12,000 Indian immigrants in the United States around the time Harris' mother, Shyamala Gopalan, arrived. Satish Korpe, an engineer who moved to Virginia in 1975, said there were so few Indian immigrants in the state when he got there that there was not a single Indian food store, and people drove to New Jersey to buy groceries.

"In the mid-1970s, if you ran into someone who was American, you might have been the first Indian person they'd ever seen," he said. "Then in the 1980s, maybe you would be the fifth. And in the 1990s, the 10th."

These changes trace back to the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the quotas that were established in the 1920s to keep America white and Protestant. The law banned discrimination based on ethnicity in the immigration system and prioritized entry for people with relatives already in the U.S. and those with special skills.

In addition to opening the door to many more immigrants from India, the law also ended a strict quota on the number of immigrants from the British West Indies.

Previously about only 100 Jamaican immigrants a year were allowed into the country. And in 1960 — around the time when Harris' father, Donald Harris, began to settle in the U.S. — there were fewer than 25,000 Jamaican immigrants in the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute. But by 2018, that number had increased to more than 733,000.

In 1970, when Harris was growing up and the effects of the 1965 law were not yet fully felt, America was still mostly a country of Black and white. Immigrants were less than 5% of the population. Harris' parents divorced when she was 5, and her mother raised Harris and her sister as Black girls because she knew American society would see them that way.

"My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters," Harris wrote in her book, "The Truths We Hold."

Navigating the divide between Black and white can be difficult for the children of immigrants who are neither. Ghazala Hashmi grew up in southern Georgia in the only Indian family in her small town.

"We were a minority of one in our school, always," said Hashmi, 56, who is now a state senator in Virginia. "I never knew anybody who was like me. It was extremely isolating."

Hashmi was in second grade when her school began to be integrated. She has clear memories of the awkward feeling of not fitting into a neat racial category in a country where people clearly wanted to put her in one.

"I was very conscious as a child of being neither Black nor white," she said. "The white children would not play with the Black children, and apparently I could play with either."

These children of immigrants are a growing political force: More than 23 million immigrants will be eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election, Pew has found. That is roughly 10% of the nation's overall electorate, a record high. And because they and their children have tended to vote for Democrats, the political winds are shifting in states like Arizona, Nevada, Virginia, Georgia and Texas.

Ashu Rai grew up in the 1970s about 70 miles east of where Harris was born. Her town had a Sikh temple that was a gathering place for South Asians from miles around. But South Asians were still rare in her suburban life, and for a while as a teenager, Rai pretended to be Hispanic.

"It was just easier to assimilate rather than trying to explain what being from India meant," said Rai.

Today Rai feels proud of her Indian roots. So when Harris was picked for the ticket last week, Rai was elated.

"My first word when I found out? I think it was a swear word," she said. "I was like, 'She's got it.' "