The Peterson Institution for International Economics has published a paper titled, “The Economic Benefits of Latino Immigration: How the Migrant Hispanic Population’s Demographic Characteristics Contribute to US Growth.” In it, researchers Gonzalo Huertas and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard say that the U.S.’s Hispanic community has been and will continue to be a huge economic driver for decades.
The main factor, say the researchers, is the great increase in the number of Latinos in the U.S. workforce—at all levels. But it is not simply higher fertility rates, higher immigration rates, or Latinos’ growing share of the U.S. workforce; it’s the quality of their workforce participation. The authors found that traditional ideas about Latinos being predominantly “unskilled and occupying low-impact parts of the economy” were just false, and that Latinos have “exceeded contemporary native-born Americans and some other migrant groups in their entrepreneurial capabilities,” bringing them into all areas of the American workforce.
A big difference between this new study and previous studies, according to the authors, is that the children of immigrants and their children are now quickly closing the educational opportunity gap, bringing Latinos closer to the national average. Huertas and Kirkegaard say that projecting forward, the demographics of the Latino community in the U.S., including falling fertility rates and increased access to education, will “likely contribute 0.21 percentage point to the annual real GDP growth rate over the next 25 years, through its impact on the increase of employed Hispanic labor.”
Given the high rate of entrepreneurship in the Latino community the researchers have identified, this large sector of our country’s GDP could grow, depending on whether those rates stay constant, increase, or fall over the next decade.
Huertas and Kirkegaard also show that as Latino communities have begun to approach average rates in education and representation in the labor force, their birth rates have dropped dramatically towards the average as well. The realities of the Latino immigrant experience in America defy traditional stereotypes—as do those of all other immigrant groups.
Donald Trump’s big idea, building a wall that will keep unicorns out, has virtually no economic benefits—it’s a bad investment. But while the high-reaching, growing, and diverse Latino communities in America are adding to the country’s wealth, former silver-spoon baby Donald Trump continues to live off of American taxpayer money and be floated by billionaire oligarchs.