America’s ‘middle’ holds its ground after the Great Recession
The share of Americans who live in middle-income households has held steady since 2010 – a flat trend that might actually be good news.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The share of Americans who live in middle-income households has held steady since 2010 – a flat trend that might actually be good news.
Hispanics will account for three-quarters of the growth in the nation’s labor force from 2010 to 2020, according to new projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). One major reason is that the Hispanic population is growing rapidly due to births and immigration. At the same time, the aging of the non-Hispanic white population is expected to reduce their numbers in the labor force.
During the sluggish two-year recovery from the Great Recession, men have gained 768,000 jobs while women have lost 218,000 jobs. This new gender gap in employment trends represents a sharp turnabout from the recession itself, when men lost more than twice as many jobs as women.
In the year following the end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. As a result, the unemployment rate fell for immigrants while it rose for the native born.
Long-term unemployment takes a much deeper toll than short-term unemployment on a person’s finances, emotional well-being and career prospects.
The current economic slowdown has taken a far greater toll on non-citizen immigrants than it has on the United States population as a whole.
Foreign-born Latinos, especially the newly arrived, were much less likely to be low-wage earners in 2005 than in 1995.
Rapid increases in the foreign-born population at the state level are not associated with negative effects on the employment of native-born workers.
Hispanics and whites perform different types of work in the labor market. Moreover, the occupational divide between the two largest segments of the labor force appears to be widening.
The Hispanic population is growing faster in much of the South than anywhere else in the United States.
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