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Latinos and Opportunity

From The State of Opportunity in America Report

The Opportunity Agenda has released The State of Opportunity in America, the first national report to measure how opportunity is faring in the United States.  The report assesses the level of opportunity for all in our nation, with special attention to Latinos and other groups who have been denied full opportunity. 

American opportunity means that everyone should have a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential.  Ensuring that fair chance requires equal treatment, economic security and mobility, a voice in decisions that affect us, a chance to start over after misfortune or missteps, and a sense of shared responsibility for each other as neighbors and fellow Americans.  The report assesses opportunity along each of these core American values and offers solutions to eliminate barriers so that everyone in our country has the chance to live the American Dream.

The report finds that, despite some areas of progress, opportunity is at risk for all Americans.  The traditional steppingstones to opportunity—an affordable home, a college education, a decent job at a living wage, access to quality health care, and economic security—are moving farther and farther out of reach for everyday Americans.  Findings and recommendations of particular relevance to Latinos include the following:

Opportunity for Latinos has expanded in certain areas.

• Although the number of racial and ethnic minorities elected to the U.S. Congress has remained relatively stagnant since 1993, the U.S. Senate for the first time includes three Latino senators in the same congressional session.
• Homeownership has slightly increased nationally, from a rate of 65% in 1979 to 68% in 2003.  Homeownership has also increased for all racial and ethnic groups.  Latinos saw the greatest gains in rate of homeownership, from just over 40% in 1989 to 47% in 2003.  But Latino households are still far less likely to own homes than whites.  Although this gap is narrowing slightly, it is significant and has persisted for decades.¹

Latinos face multiple barriers, at rates much higher than the national average.  Many of these barriers are increasing and cannot be overcome through hard work and perseverance alone. 

• While Latino children constitute less than one-fifth of children in the United States, they represent over one-third of uninsured children.  And among children in fair or poor health who lack insurance (nearly 570,000 children in 2002), over two-thirds are Latino.²
• Over 42% of Latino poor and 37% of Latino non-poor people lacked a regular source of health care in 2001 and 2002, an increase of more than 30% and 18%, respectively, since 1995 and 1996.³
• In 1960, poor Latino families were three times as likely as poor white families to live in high-poverty neighborhoods with limited resources; by 2000 they were 5.7 times more likely to live in such areas.⁴ 
• Since 1973 the share of Latino males earning poverty-level or near-poverty-level wages has increased, while the proportion of this group earning moderate wages has declined.⁵  

Discrimination based on race and nationality persists, stifling the opportunity of millions of Americans.

• A 2000 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development study found that whites were favored over similarly-qualified Latinos 26% of the time in rental markets and 20% of the time in housing sales.⁶
• A Boston Federal Reserve Bank study in 1990 found that the conventional mortgage loan rejection rate for Latino applicants in the Boston area was 82% higher than for similarly-qualified white applicants.  More recent studies using a range of controls have yielded similar findings.⁷

Bold action by our government and national institutions is needed to expand opportunity for all.  The report urges our nation’s leaders to:

• Assess the impact of public policies on all dimensions of opportunity, by requiring Opportunity Impact Statements for all publicly funded projects. 
• Train Americans to adapt to a global economy, evolving technology, and an increasingly diverse population—with particular attention to groups of Americans who face the steepest barriers to opportunity.
• Modernize safety net programs that help people meet their basic needs and become economically secure.
• Renew a commitment to human rights in the United States, by vigorously enforcing existing civil rights laws and implementing a new generation of human rights laws.
• Prioritize crime prevention and rehabilitation over incarceration.
• Protect democratic participation and promote diverse involvement in the American political process, by establishing minimum federal standards for voting equipment and procedures and by vigorously enforcing the Voting Rights Act and the Help America Vote Act.

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Endnotes

1. Economic Policy Institute analysis of Current Population Survey data, 2005.
2. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Going Without: America’s Uninsured Children, www.rwjf.org (August 2005); The Urban Institute, “Fast Facts on Welfare Policy,” www.urban.org (19 July 2005). 
3. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation 2003.
4. Poverty and Race Research Action Council analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, with the assistance of Nancy A. Denton and Bridget J. Anderson, 2005.
5. Economic Policy Institute analysis of Current Population Survey data, 2005.
6. M. Turner et al., Discrimination in Metropolitan Housing Markets: National Results from Phase 1 of HDS 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2002).
7. A.H. Munnell, L.E. Browne, J. McEneaney, and G.M.B. Tootell, “Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data,” American Economic Review 86, no. 1 (1996): 25-53; A.L. Ross and J. Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).