The economy added nearly 300,000 jobs in February and no group seems to have benefited from the recent rush of job creation as Hispanics. According to the U.S. Labor Department, employment among Hispanics is up by approximately five percent over the past twelve months. That compares to three point eight percent job growth among African-Americans and one point four percent for whites.
According to the recent Economic Report of the President, of all the nation’s major ethic and racial groups, only Hispanics had returned to their pre-recession unemployment levels by late last year. One of the reasons for this has been rebounding construction employment. As indicated by writer Noam Scheiber, construction employment among Hispanics declined by seven hundred thousand during the downturn.
But last year, the construction industry as a whole gained more than half a million jobs, or about twenty percent of all jobs created in the U.S. Of those, more than three hundred thousand went to Hispanics, with particularly large gains registered in California, Florida and Texas.