How Foreign- and U.S.-Born Latinos Fare During Recessions and Recoveries

Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny

No 2104, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Abstract: Latinos make up the nation’s largest ethnic minority group. The majority of Latinos are U.S. born, making the progress and well-being of Latinos no longer just a question of immigrant assimilation but also of the effectiveness of U.S. educational institutions and labor markets in equipping young Latinos to move out of the working class and into the middle class. One significant headwind to progress among Latinos is recessions. Economic outcomes of Latinos are far more sensitive to the business cycle than are outcomes for non-Hispanic whites. Latinos also have higher poverty rates than whites, although the gap had been falling prior to the pandemic. Deep holes in the pandemic safety net further imperiled Latino progress in 2020 and almost surely will in 2021 as well. Policies that would help working-class and poor Latinos include immigration reform and education reform and broader access to affordable health care.

Keywords: Hispanics; immigrants; working class; business cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J11 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27
Date: 2021-04-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-mig
Note: This paper was prepared for a special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “What has happened to the American Working Class since the Great Recession?”
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/documents/research/papers/2021/wp2104.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Foreign- and U.S.-Born Latinos Fare during Recessions and Recoveries (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:feddwp:90679

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.24149/wp2104

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Chapman ().