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 The unemployment
rate for foreign-born Hispanics increased from 5.1% to 8.0%, or
by 2.9 percentage points, from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the
fourth quarter of 2008.
The current recession is having an
especially severe impact on employment prospects for immigrant
Hispanics, according to an analysis of the latest Census Bureau
data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research
Center. The unemployment rate for foreign-born Hispanics
increased from 5.1% to 8.0%, or by 2.9 percentage points, from
the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008. During
this same time period, the unemployment rate for all persons in
the labor market increased from 4.6% to 6.6%, or by 2.0
percentage points.
Among immigrant Latinos, the share of the working-age
population (16 and older) that is employed fell by 2.8
percentage points, from 67.5% in the fourth quarter of 2007 to
64.7% in the fourth quarter of 2008.1 Among all persons of
working age, the employment rate decreased by 1.6 percentage
points, from 63.2% to 61.6%, in the first year of the recession.
The recession has also had a strong negative effect on blacks
and native-born Hispanics in the labor market. Blacks are
currently the only major racial and ethnic group whose
unemployment rate is in double digits, 11.5% in the fourth
quarter of 2008. Native-born Hispanics had the second highest
rate of unemployment (9.5%) in the fourth quarter of 2008.
However, changes in the employment rate and other indicators of
labor market activity during the recession have been less severe
for them than for foreign-born Hispanics.
This report summarizes labor market outcomes for Hispanics
and other racial and ethnic groups in the ongoing recession.
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S.
economy entered a recession in December 2007. The Pew Hispanic
Center released two reports in 2008 that captured the early
phases of the recession. The first report, in June 2008, focused
on the construction slowdown and showed that outcomes for
Latinos had turned markedly worse during 2007, even prior to the
recession. The second report, in December 2008, showed that a
small but significant decline had occurred in the share of
Latino immigrants active in the U.S. labor force through the
third quarter of 2008. This report updates labor market trends
through the fourth quarter of 2008, capturing the first full
year of the recession.
The data for this report are derived from the Current
Population Survey, a monthly survey of about 55,000 households
conducted jointly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the
Census Bureau. Data from three monthly surveys were combined to
create larger sample sizes and to conduct the analysis on a
quarterly basis. The universe for the analysis is the civilian,
noninstitutional population ages 16 and older.2
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