Hispanic Unemployment Down, Study Finds

Unemployment among Hispanics fell sharply this year, and their wages rose after a two-year decline, according to a national study released yesterday.

Bolstered by immigration, the Hispanic labor force is growing rapidly, and those workers are having little trouble finding jobs -- especially in construction, said the report by the Pew Hispanic Center.

"In terms of employment, there are strong gains for Hispanics," said Rakesh Kochhar, the center's associate director for research and author of the report.

Latinos, who represent 13 percent of the U.S. labor force, accounted for 40 percent of all new workers in the year ending June 30, the report said. Eighty percent of jobs filled by Hispanics went to immigrants, who make up the biggest share of the Latino labor force.

The findings come as Congress debates proposals for immigration laws, some addressing the immigrant workforce and the hiring of illegal immigrants, and immigration authorities step up work site arrests and border security.

Kochhar said the number of immigrant workers and the market for them seem to be "stronger than what we may do at the borders."

Although the report did not examine labor trends for illegal immigrants, it noted that previous studies have found that many new Latino immigrants are in the country illegally.

The Latino labor force is growing about three times the rate for all workers, the report found. Hispanic unemployment fell this spring to 4.9 percent from 5.8 percent in the same period last year. Median weekly wages for Latinos rose from $423 in 2005 to $431 in 2006 -- still lower than those of any other ethnic group.

This decade's construction boom drove the Latino job growth, particularly for the foreign-born, the report said. Half the new jobs for Latinos in the past year were in construction, and nearly all those jobs were generated in the South and the West, according to the report, which did not examine trends at the state or city level.

Since 2003, nearly 90 percent of Latinos workers hired in construction have been immigrants, the report found.

That came as no surprise to Hugo Carballo, business manager for Laborers International Union Local 11, which organizes construction workers in Northern Virginia.

"You just go through any job. That's all you see right now. A majority of them are Latino who are working on construction," Carballo said. "It might be that in a couple of years it'll be somebody else, but right now we are the ones."