A new report finds that the Latino population in the U.S. has a price tag of about just over two trillion dollars. If the Latino Gross Domestic Product (GDP) were its own country, it would rank as the 7th largest in the world, according to data publicly available at the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Labor.
“I’ve been studying Latinos for over 40 years, and you can point out some amazing things about Latinos, but people just yawn. But if you reframe Latinos in terms investors can understand, by size and growth rate, we can have a better idea of Latinos importance in the U.S. economy”, said Hayes-Bautista, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the School of Medicine, UCLA.
The report also claims the U.S. Latino GDP is growing 70 percent faster than the U.S. non-Latino GDP. With 70 percent of the workforce being Latino, Latinos have the highest labor force participation rates.
Another common misperception around the country, the report finds, is that “non-U.S. citizen Latinos do not participate in the work force as much as other populations. In fact, male Latino non-citizens have an extremely high work force participation rate, over 90 percent for young mature workers aged 25 to 49.”
The main takeaway from the report is that the country’s economic future depends on the interconnectedness between ethnicities and generations. Given how vital Latinos are to the U.S., there should be greater investment in education, infrastructure, job training, and health care, rather than a constant flow of negative messaging.
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