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It ultimately doesn't make a dramatic difference, but, in most parts of the country, whites are much less than half English.
Outside of Utah, parts of the South, and Upper New England, I would be surprised if most whites in any given area were 1/3 English.
Well sure, but 1/4 Cuban or Mexican or Puerto Rican or Venezuelan, 1/2 Italian, 1/4 German whites aren’t functionally any different. It’s just an example.
Right, it's not a problem, it's just kind of my personal crusade. People learn American history with a focus on the early history and think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today when it really doesn't. Mass immigration in the 19th century already caused the majority portion of the white population to be non-English descended in many parts of the country. By the early 1920's, for example, most of the major East coast metropolises were 70%+ descendants of immigrants in the last three generations. These immigrant populations have since moved all over the country and diluted what remained of colonial populations. Even the populations of much of the plains states are often only a third to half descended from English settlers or immigrants -- it's just the immigrant populations that settled much of those areas were Northern European Protestants so they just kind of blend in as assimilated and invisible.
There's no real point to it, it's just a popular impression of the American population that is very wrong. Probably less than a third of the population (including black Americans) is descended from colonial settlers and, while the English did send a great many immigrants to the US in the 19th century, they tended to be overwhelmingly middle class and so were often less fecund than Catholic immigrants to start with and rapidly assimilated to native born birth rates.
I've never heard anyone assert this as those posing as Germans and Irish are clearly far more numerous. How often does it come up for you?
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While there are not that many Americans of purely English ancestry remaining, I think it's important to note that the fraction with any such ancestry is likely still a supermajority. This includes pretty much every black descendant of slaves, most whites in the south where the impact of European immigration was minimal, people like me in the north who have an English surname despite having less than 1/16 colonial English ancestors, and the increasing numbers of mixed-race Hispanics and Asians whose parents married into the white majority.
While true to an extent, it's also worth remembering that inter-faith marriages were almost as no-no as inter-racial marriage for a long time in many places. It has probably only been since the Boomers that that has entirely disappeared. In places where the immigrants were Protestant, they would likely intermarry and quickly assimilate with the English descended population. Where they were not, English descent is going to be relatively much lower.
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