2023-09-21 12:37:24
EL NUEVO DIARIO, LOS ANGELES.- The Latin population in the US reached a gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.2 trillion dollars in 2021, which would make it the fifth economy in the world if it were a country, according to a study released this Thursday by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, in English).
The GDP of the Latin population in 2021 is located after the global GDP of the US, China, Japan and Germany, and already exceeds the economies of countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada, the report revealed, which warns that This community is resilient and the hope of the country.
The UCLA findings show that, despite the blow that the covid-19 pandemic represented for Latinos in the country, the GDP of this population grew by 7.1% in 2021 adjusted for inflation, exceeding the mark of 3 trillion dollars for the first time.
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“These data demonstrate that Latinos are a very important source of resilience and hope for the American economy,” David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA and co-author of the study, told EFE.
An example of this resilience is that, even though Latinos represent only one-fifth of the US population, they were responsible for 39% of the country’s real GDP growth during 2020 and 2021.
And when compared to the world’s 10 largest economies, Latin GDP had the second fastest growth from 2020 to 2021, only behind China.
Despite these figures, Hayes Bautista warns that the contributions of the Latino population to the US economy “are not recognized.”
“There is a narrative that Latinos are not high-profile, that we are undocumented, that we live at the expense of the state, that we are drug traffickers,” the academic elaborates.
He explains that this narrative creates labels for Latinos as “dysfunctional and illegal,” something that generations of Hispanics have struggled with and has sapped their momentum.
“It is important that we Latinos reject this narrative because we are internalizing it and it is harming us,” says Hayes Bautista.
For this reason, the expert began almost 20 years ago to develop the idea of using government data to calculate a solid statistic of the economic performance of Latinos in the US, just as the country’s performance is calculated.
In 2017, the first report was delivered and since 2019, annual reports on the US Latino GDP have been prepared.
The report, produced by scholars at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture and California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, now also estimates the economic performance of Latinos in all 50 states. from the country.
In 2021, 76% of the country’s Latino population (47 million) lived in just ten states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas. The research found that thanks to Latinos, the population and workforce of states such as Pennsylvania, Illinois, California and New York did not decrease from 2015 to 2021.
The states with the fastest growing Latino population from 2015 to 2021 were New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Vermont, Tennessee and Idaho.
“Everywhere in the US we see that the contributions of Latinos are translating into economic and demographic growth,” highlights Hayes Bautista.
He adds that the main economic activities of Latinos in the US are finance, construction and insurance. “Our presence has extended to all economic activities in the country.”
The academic projects that the GDP growth of Hispanics will not stop in the coming decades in the US due to their high participation in the labor force and their rapid advances in educational levels. He is also optimistic that Hispanics will be the foundation of the country’s population growth.
“We represent almost the only hope for economic growth in the 21st century for the United States, which is why we must invest in this population, not deport,” said Hayes Bautista.
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