Toll of Obama Recession, Hispanic Poverty Rate Highest In USA

 

WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director, Pew Hispanic Center, and D'Vera Cohn, Senior Writer, Pew Research Center) November 9, 2011 — For more than a decade, the Census Bureau has been developing an alternative measure of poverty intended to better reflect the costs of basic living expenses as well as the resources people have to pay them. The bureau has just released results for 2010 from the alternative metric — called the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) — that uses a wider range of factors than the official federal measure to determine poverty status.

 

The additional data used in the alternative measure include medical expenses, tax credits, non-cash government benefits (such as food stamps, housing subsidies and school lunch programs) and cost-of-living adjustments for different geographic areas. The alternative measure is not intended to replace the official poverty measure, at least for now. For the foreseeable future, the Census Bureau will report two sets of numbers.

Compared with the official measure, SPM figures released by the Census Bureau show a higher national poverty rate for 2010, 16.0%, compared with the official poverty rate of 15.2%. The number of poor people in 2010 was 49.1 million using the alternative measure, compared with 46.6 million using the official measure. Using the SPM also resulted in higher poverty rates for some groups and lower poverty rates for others, when compared with the official measure.

Among the nation's largest racial and ethnic groups, poverty rates using the alternative measure are higher than official poverty rates for Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites and Asians, but are lower for blacks. For Hispanics, the SPM poverty rate (28.2%) was 1.5 percentage points higher than the official poverty rate of 26.7%. For whites, the SPM poverty rate was 11.1% while the official poverty rate was 10.0%. For Asians, the SPM poverty rate was 16.7% versus the official poverty rate of 12.1%. By contrast, the SPM poverty rate for blacks, 25.4% in 2010, was 2.1 percentage points lower than the official poverty rate of 27.5%.

When the alternative measure is used, a greater share of Hispanics in 2010 lived in poverty than any other group. By contrast, when using the official poverty rate, a greater share of blacks in 2010 lived in poverty than Hispanics or any other group. Even so, no matter which measure is used, Hispanics make up nearly three-in-ten of the nation's poor — 28.6% under the official poverty measure and 28.7% under the SPM.

The report also contains comparisons of the official poverty rate and the SPM poverty rate for children, the elderly, the native born, immigrants, those who live in cities and suburbs and those who live outside metropolitan areas.

Childhood Poverty Among Hispanics Sets Record, Leads USA

WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director, Pew Hispanic Center, and Gabriel Velasco, Research Analyst, Pew Hispanic Center) November 9, 2011 — The spread of poverty across the United States that began at the onset of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and accelerated last year hit one fast-growing demographic group especially hard: Hispanic children.

More Hispanic children are living in poverty — 6.1 million in 2010 — than children of any other racial or ethnic group. This marks the first time in U.S. history that the single largest group of poor children is not white. In 2010, 37.3% of poor children were Hispanic, 30.5% were white and 26.6% were black.

This negative milestone for Hispanics is a product of their growing numbers, high birth rates and declining economic fortunes. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Hispanics today make up a record 16.3% of the total U.S. population. But they comprise an even larger share — 23.1% — of the nation's children, a disparity driven mainly by high birth rates among Hispanic immigrants.

Of the 6.1 million Hispanic children living in poverty, more than two-thirds (4.1 million) are the children of immigrant parents. The other 2 million are the children of parents born in the U.S. Among the 4.1 million impoverished Hispanic children of immigrants, the vast majority (86.2%) were born in the U.S.

The Great Recession, which began in 2007 and officially ended in 2009, had a large impact on the Hispanic community. At its beginning, the unemployment rate among Hispanic workers increased rapidly, especially among immigrant workers. Today, the unemployment rate among Hispanics, at 11.1%, is higher than the national unemployment rate of 9.1%. Household wealth among Hispanics declined more sharply than either black or white households between 2005 and 2009. And according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food insecurity among Hispanic households increased sharply at the start of the Great Recession. In 2008, nearly a third (32.1%) of Hispanic households with children faced food insecurity, up from 23.8% in 2007.

Prior to the Great Recession, more white children lived in poverty than Hispanic children. However, since 2007, that pattern has reversed. Between 2007 and 2010, an additional 1.6 million Hispanic children lived in poverty, an increase of 36.3%. By contrast, even though the number of white and black children living in poverty also grew, their numbers grew more slowly — up 17.6% and 11.7% respectively.