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| In Queens: Elmhurst Hospital Center promoted newly born Emanuel Plata as the 300 millionth American |
The baby was born at or about 7:46 a.m. Eastern time, when, the Census Bureau estimates, the nation’s population reached that milestone.
Theoretically, the 300 millionth American may have arrived at an airport from overseas at that hour. Still, hospital publicists and proud new parents were left to stake their claims to the title.
In Queens, the nation’s most diverse county, Emanuel Plata weighed in at 6 pounds 15 ounces at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where he was all but indistinguishable from the 4,400 other infants born there each year except for a tiny white cap, provided by hospital officials, that proclaimed in blue letters, “America’s 300 millionth baby.”
His mother, Gricelda Plata, 22, was draped in an oversized T-shirt that announced, “I delivered America’s 300 millionth baby.” She and the boy’s father, Armando Jimenez, 25, a cook who works in Forest Hills, are immigrants from Puebla, Mexico, and live in East New York, Brooklyn.
Asked by reporters whether he considered himself lucky to be the father of a celebrity, Mr. Jimenez replied: “My baby is healthy. My wife is fine. What more luck do I want?”
At New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital in Manhattan, Zoë Hudson was born, the daughter of native New Yorkers. Zoë’s father, Garvin, 29, an investment banker, is the son of a couple from Jamaica, and her mother, Maria Diaz, 28, a teacher in Harlem, is of Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage.
“We’re Hispanic, and we celebrate so many different holidays,” said Zoë’s maternal grandmother, Rosemary Garcia, “but also the American holidays. But how do you celebrate being the 300 millionth American born in a family of Hispanics, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans? It’s just so Americanized.”
At the Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, Md., a crowd broke into cheers at 7:46 when the digital population clock — calculating that an American is born every 7 seconds, one dies every 13 seconds and the nation gains an immigrant from abroad every 31 seconds — flashed 300,000,000.
The United States is now one of three countries with more than 300 million people, ranking behind China and India. (The Soviet Union had nearly 300 million before it dissolved.) In contrast to most other industrialized nations, America has a population that is still growing, propelled by immigration and higher fertility rates.
Statistically, demographers generally agreed, the person who pushed the national population to 300 million was most likely a Hispanic boy in the Southwest.
“I’m still going with the Latino baby boy in Los Angeles,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. “This is a symbol of where we’re heading: the new American melting pot.”
