Taken as a whole, Latinos in the United States represented the world’s fifth-largest GDP in 2020, according to research commissioned by the Bank of America Charitable Foundation.
Part of U.S. Latinos' economic standing comes from a high labor participation rate that persisted throughout the pandemic.
Researchers from California Lutheran University and UCLA Health analyzed a decade's worth of Latino economic and health data across several metropolitan areas, including Charlotte. They found Latinos were vital to sustaining the U.S. labor market, working in vital, usually in-person industries, during the COVID-19 crisis.
The Metro Latino GDP report for Charlotte and other major metro areas is available online.
The U.S. Latino population was one of the groups hardest hit by COVID-19 infections and fatalities in 2020. But the group's economic power also increased that year, according to researcher Matthew Fienup and his colleagues.
“Latino income surged nearly 7% during the pandemic because they were holding up the economy during those darkest days,” Fineup said Tuesday during a presentation in uptown Charlotte. “The reality is that in many cases they got sick, they went home and they immediately returned to work.”
Overall, the researchers found the cumulative U.S. Latino GDP reached $2.8 trillion that year.
“How big is $2.8 trillion? If U.S. Latinos were their own country, their GDP would actually rank as the fifth largest GDP in the world, in fact, larger than the entire economy of countries like the United Kingdom, India and France,” he said.
Before the pandemic, Latinos already had a higher labor force participation rate than non-Latinos. That’s still true.
In the Charlotte metro area, Latinos were 8.8 percentage points more likely to be working than their non-Latino counterparts, Fienup said.
”The Charlotte metro Latino population is growing at a rate nearly twice as fast as non-Latinos, and the labor force growth premium is two times that of non-Latinos here in the Charlotte metro area,” he added.
While Latinos are about 10% of the Charlotte area population, they represent more than 17% of labor force growth.
Charlotte-area Latinos stood out to the researchers for their economic contributions in fields like construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail, hospitality and government services.
During a panel discussion about the GDP report, Federico Rios of the Foundation for the Carolinas highlighted the importance of narrative and recognizing the economic contributions of Latinos to the U.S. economy throughout the pandemic.
“The narrative [is] that immigrants — and often that's painted with a broad brush to mean Latinos specifically — are taking, when, in fact, what we saw is we're giving,” Rios said. “We're propping up the entire system, especially the piece around COVID and Latinos serving as essential workers.”
