Immigration Impacts List of Top Ten Surnames in America

Can you guess what the most popular surnames are these days? My surname is Hicks. We ranked #155 in the country. I figured that Smith and Jones were still in the Top 10. I didn't know that Garcia and Rodriguez were on that list. This is another indication of the changing demographics of our country.

The top ten surnames are:

1. Smith - only one if five Smiths are Black
2. Johnson
3. Williams
4. Brown
5. Jones
6. Miller
7. Davis
8. Garcia
9. Rodriguez
10. Wilson

Click here to see if your surname is in the Top 500. Anyhow, the Census Bureau study found that while Smith remains the most popular surname, Latino surnames are increasingly edging out historically common Anglo names. The number of Latino surnames in the top 25 doubled to six, the study shows.

Immigration has been the major factor prompting the rise in the Latino population in the United States. During the 1990s, the number of Latinos in America grew 58 percent and accounted for 13 percent of the country's 281,421,906 million population in 2000; today the number of Latinos tops 44 million and they are close to 15 percent of the population. People of color, largely fueled by the Latino population explosion, now are the majority in California and are expected to be the majority of the U.S. population by 2050.

One of the other findings of the survey is that nearly 90 percent of Washingtons and 75 percent of Jeffersons in America are Black. I wonder what that says about our our early presidents, George and Tom?