Latino Workers in the Ongoing Recession: 2007 to 2008
A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that a small but significant decline has occurred in the share of Latino immigrants active in the U.S. labor force during the current recession. The report, Latino Workers in the Ongoing Recession: 2007 to 2008 (31 pages, PDF), found that the number of Latino immigrants in the labor force fell by 1.1 percent between 2007 and the close of the third quarter of 2008, following a steady increase in foreign-born Latino labor force participation rate since 2003. Over the same period, the labor force participation rate was essentially unchanged for non-Hispanics and native-born Hispanics. Although the growth in the immigrant Latino population has leveled off in recent years, the report was unable to determine whether a certain percentage of the foreign-born Latinos who left the labor force returned to their countries of origin.
