Hispanic job gains
A burst of jobs over the past 12 months has gone to people of Hispanic and Latino descent.
One in six people in the United States are Hispanic. But over the past year, this group has accounted for fully 46 percent of the 2.7 million jobs that have been added in that time, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 1.25 million jobs for Hispanics.
This suggests that healthy economic growth — which is fueled in part by steady gains in the labor force — will depend on an increasingly diverse workforce. Because the nation’s Hispanic population is disproportionately young, this group is likely to provide a steady source of labor for the economy. When Pew Research studied median age by race and ethnicity, it found that the median was 43 for non-Hispanic whites. By contrast, the median age for Hispanics was just 28 .
The relative youth of Hispanics is also reflected in their breakdown in the U.S.-born population, with roughly 75 percent of them belonging to the millennial generation or younger.