Posts Tagged: unemployment
Immigration is not the top issue for Hispanics
Immigration reform “now occupies almost all the Latino policy agenda, sucking up, as one colleague recently put it, all the oxygen on Latino issues,” according to a recent commentary from Angelo Falcón, National Institute for Latino Policy president.
Indeed, when Pew Research Center has surveyed the Hispanic community, there are several issues that consistently rank higher on the list than immigration. In 2013, some 57% of Hispanic registered voters called education an “extremely important” issue facing the nation today. That's compared with jobs and the economy (52%) and health care (43%). Just 32% said immigration.
Since 2007, about one-third of Hispanic registered voters have called immigration an “extremely important” issue to them personally. Even among Hispanic immigrants, the share was 35% in 2012.
While about seven-in-ten of all Latinos in 2013 said it was important for Congress to pass significant new immigration legislation that year, the share who said so was higher among immigrants (80%) than among the U.S. born (57%). Among the general public, 49% of U.S. adults said so when asked the same question in February.
In some respects, Hispanics' focus on education as a top issue makes sense. In 2010, Hispanics had the highest birth rates—80 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, compared with 64 for blacks, 59 for whites and 56 for Asians. Fully one-in-three (33%) Hispanics are school age (under 18), compared with one-in-five (20%) whites.
The economy has been another top issue among Hispanics, who said the recession hit them harder than other groups. Among Hispanics in 2012, the economy and jobs (54%) ranked about as high as education (55%) as an issue “extremely important” to them personally. The unemployment rate among Hispanics peaked at 12.3% in 2010, compared with 8.9% among non-Hispanics. The unemployment rate for Hispanics has steadily fallen since then (8.9% in 2013), but remains above pre-recession levels (4.9% in 2006).
Source: Pew Research Center, Top issue for Hispanics? Hint: It's not immigration,by Jens Manuel Krogstad, June 2, 2014.
Report finds Hispanics faring better than Blacks
The annual report, called the State of Black America, also included a ranking of income inequality and unemployment for 77 American cities that had large black populations and 83 cities that had large Hispanic populations, based on data from the American Community Survey, an annual survey by the Census Bureau.
Nationwide, black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites (13.1 percent of blacks versus 6.5 percent of whites, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The rate for Hispanics was 9.1 percent. The report also focused on underemployment which includes those who are jobless and not looking or working part-time jobs but desiring full-time work. According to the report, the underemployment rate for black workers was 20.5 percent, compared with 18.4 percent for Hispanic workers and 11.8 percent for white workers.
The report ranked metropolitan statistical areas where the unemployment gap between blacks and whites was both larger and smaller than the national average.
There were also differences in income between blacks and whites. The region with the smallest gap in median income between blacks and whites was Riverside, California, which also had one of the smallest unemployment gaps between the two groups. In that area, the median household income for blacks was $44,572 a year compared with $57,252 for whites.
There were no cities where blacks fared better than whites in terms of income or employment. That was not true for Hispanics.
Source: Published originally on The New York Times as Report Finds Hispanics Faring Better Than Blacks byTanzina Vega, April 2, 2014.
Unemployment and economic growth: greatest concern to nearly four in 10 Hispanic voters
Among all Americans and U.S. registered voters, healthcare, economic growth, and the federal deficit roughly tie as the most important issues, while immigration ranks last among both groups of Americans.
The new USA Today/Gallup poll makes it clear that economic issues -- particularly unemployment and economic growth -- are more important to Hispanic voters nationwide than immigration.
Hispanic immigrants and first-generation Hispanic Americans are more likely to mention immigration than those whose family has been in the U.S. longer than that. Specifically, 16% of Hispanic voters who are themselves immigrants to the U.S. name immigration as a priority, similar to the 14% of those who were born here but with at least one parent born abroad. By contrast, 7% of Hispanic voters who, along with their parents, were U.S.-born do the same.
The findings are based on Gallup Daily tracking interviews with 1,753 Hispanic adults in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia conducted April 16-May 31. The sample includes 1,005 Hispanic registered voters who, on a weighted basis, represent 47% of the total sample of U.S. Hispanics.
Source: Gallup, Hispanic Voters Put Other Issues Before Immigration, www.gallup.com, June 25, 2012.
/span>Children of immigrants put dreams aside
![ImmigrantChildren ImmigrantChildren](http://ucanr.org/blogs/LatinoBriefs/blogfiles/9774.jpg)
He reaches into the leafy green rows of fruit, touches a melon to gauge its ripeness, and then tosses it into a cart, where another laborer boxes it. Walk, pick, toss. The pattern goes on all morning.
Harvesting cantaloupes for $8.25 an hour isn’t the job that Romero, 28, dreamed of as a child. Born in Newark, N.J., to immigrant parents from El Salvador, he graduated from high school and has taken classes at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and Merced Community College. He has experience as a special education teacher but, unable to find a teaching job, he’s started working in the fields.
“I’d rather keep myself working than get in trouble,” he said, wiping his hands on his ripped jeans, stained with grass. “My dad started from nothing. He worked hard, so I don’t mind working hard, too.”
Many young Americans are finding themselves worse off than their parents were at their age, without jobs or working below their skill and education levels. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds is 17.4 percent, up from 10.6 percent in 2006.
The situation is even tougher for children of immigrants, such as Romero. Their parents paved the way by working tough jobs so their children could get an education and secure their place in the middle class. Now, with middle-class jobs disappearing, many children of immigrants are settling for the jobs their parents did, even if they are better educated.
Economists worry that the lack of mobility imperils the country’s productivity, especially since about a third of American adults ages 18 to 34 are foreign-born or children of immigrants.
Only 47 percent of Americans think their children will have a higher standard of living as adults than they do, down from 62 percent in 2009, according to a poll done in May on behalf of the Pew Economic Mobility Project.
Concerns about the availability of a middle-class lifestyle are likely to be a hot topic this election season. It has already come up in such diverse forums as Occupy Wall Street and the Republican presidential debates. About half of Americans think the government does more to hurt people trying to move up the economic ladder than it does to help them, according to the Pew poll. About 80 percent said the government was doing an ineffective job of helping poor and middle-class Americans.
In 2008, there were about 32 million people in the U.S. with either one or two foreign-born parents. They include a wide range of educational and cultural backgrounds, but overall, those ages 18 to 34 lag in reaching traditional adult milestones, including leaving home, finishing school and entering the work force, according to a 2008 study by Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
“If I had to update that study, the situation would be much more dire for children of immigrants,” Rumbaut said.
In the study, about 24 percent of young adults born in the U.S. to Mexican parents were high school dropouts, compared with 11 percent of whites with native parentage and 7 percent of children born in the U.S. to Indian immigrants.
Even education doesn't always help, as some of the fastest-growing sectors in the economy are those that require few skills. Personal service and care jobs, which paid an average of $25,000 last year, grew 27% over the last decade. Food preparation and service jobs grew 11%. They pay an average of $21,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"A lot of families who felt at one point that they were on the solid rung of the American middle-class ladder are slipping and falling down a rung," said Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley.
Decreasing access to the middle class could especially imperil economic recovery in states such as California, Florida, New York and Texas, where nearly 60% of young adults are immigrants or children of immigrants.
"A key to the future of California — and to that of a nation being transformed by immigration — will be how the rapidly expanding generation of young adults is incorporated" into its economy, politics and society, Rumbaut wrote. "For a sizable proportion of the nation's immigrant population, that access is now blocked."
Source: Los Angeles Times, “Children of immigrants hit an economic ceiling”, by Alana Semuels, November 1, 2011.
In Two Years of Economic Recovery, Women Lost Jobs, Men Found Them
![Unemployment women Unemployment women](http://ucanr.org/blogs/LatinoBriefs/blogfiles/9128.jpg)
Employment trends during the recovery have favored men over women in all but one of the 16 major sectors of the economy identified in this report. In five sectors, notably in retail trade, men have gained jobs while women have lost them. In five other sectors, including education and health services and professional and business services, men gained jobs at a faster rate than women. And in an additional five sectors, such as construction and local governments, men lost jobs at a slower rate than women. The sole exception to these patterns is state government, a sector of the economy in which women have added jobs during the recovery while men have lost them.
Trends in the Unemployment Rate
Changes in the unemployment rate for women and men transcended race, ethnicity and nativity. Men, whether Hispanic, white, black, Asian, native born or foreign born, experienced higher increases than women in the unemployment rate in the recession. The recovery has proceeded uniformly for men across race, ethnicity and nativity -- the unemployment rate has dropped for all groups of men.
Among women in the recovery, the unemployment rate for white women decreased, but it increased for Hispanic, black and Asian women. The unemployment rate for native-born women was virtually unchanged, but it increased for foreign-born women.
Changes in the unemployment rate confirm the unique nature of the current recovery. It is the first recovery in which the unemployment rates for men and women have gone in opposite directions -- falling for men but rising for women.
Source: Pew Research Center, “In Two Years of Economic Recovery, Women Lost Jobs, Men Found them”, July, 2011, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2049/unemployment-jobs-gender-recession-ec
Employment