Two weeks ago, commemorating the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden celebrated the country's inflation drop and said the act  will be responsible for creating 1.5 million jobs over the next decade. At the same time, the unemployment rate has been decreasing and has already reached 3.5% of thepopulation, considering a workforce of about 170 million people. However, how much of this share of the economy is composed of latinos, considering, for example, the more than 63 million Hispanics living in the United States?

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020, Latinos represented 18% of the American workforce, a very expressive number. Considering the nation's states, New Mexico has the highest percentage of Latino workers compared to its total workforce at 43.6%, followed by California (37.7%) and Texas (37.4%). Furthermore, Latino entrepreneurs make up a generous portion of the US economy. Considering the 5 million Latinos who own some type of business in the United States, this population injects more than US$ 800 billion into the economy, and one in four new companies are Latino-owned.

So, nowadays Latinos have a significant impact on the US economy, and in 2020 alone, this population was responsible for 13% of the national GDP, a value of approximately US$ 2.8trillion. Considering that latinos represent 18% of the total workforce, the income created and received by Latinos is lower than the US average.

Considering the main areas that employ Latinos the most in the economy, agriculture, fishing and forestry are the most occupied by this population, with a percentage of around 43% of their jobs. In addition to it, other areas can be highlighted: Maintenance Services (37.9%), Construction and Extraction (35.7%), Food Preparation and Service (27.3%) and Material Transport and Locomotion (23.9%). These areas are related to precarious or low-paid working conditions. As it can be seen, inversely proportional to the participation of latinos in the GDP, the percentages of Latino presence in these sectors are much higher than the participation of the segment in the total population of the country.

Another important point is the fact that the white population rejects these types of jobs, which end up being occupied for Latinos and African Americans, often with a lack of opportunity to fill better-paid positions. On this point, according to data from the National Library of Medicine, new immigrants who arrive in the country, tend to occupy dangerous jobs with low wages, as is the case of Mexicans in the sectors of services, construction and agriculture. Nevertheless, there is little government concern with the quality of the work of this group, fundamental to the American economy. These data destroy the thesis of the extreme right supremacist that immigrants remove jobs from the white population. Without Latino labor, the orchard harvest sector in Florida and California would be unfeasible.

Despite this, it is important to point out that some governors even approve immigration laws that make life difficult for these people, like Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, who seeks to rival Donald Trump for the extremist flag dispute in the Republican Party. Among many of his controversial actions, the governor of Florida signed immigration law SB 1718, which intensifies punishments and restrictions to detain undocumented workers in the state (Florida immigrants leave the state over DeSantis immigration law (nbcnews.com). To verify the legal status of migrants, the Florida government is using the E-Verify app to find each person's status online. According to Newsweek Magazine, which interviewed Professor Hector Sandoval of the University of Florida about the impacts of the DeSantis measure: “Using the E-Verify system to confirm the eligibility of employees to work in the US can decrease the number of undocumented workers into the labor market, resulting in a reduction in the overall labor supply." On the other hand, Sandoval adds: "employers may face additional challenges filling open positions and will likely raise wages to attract legal workers." Higher production costs mean higher prices for consumers and additional pressure on inflation rates. According to the Florida Policy Institute, this law could cost the state economy US$ 12.6 billion, a significant number that, for local authorities, doesn't seem to impress.

Latino labor (both legal and undocumented) plays a key role in the US economy. Representing 18% of the workforce, this population corresponds to 5 million business owners and a share of more than US$ 2.5 trillion of the GDP. However, discrimination and inequality persist in the country, with Latinos earning less than the white population and facing government neglect. An example of this is the fact that for every dollar earned by a white American, a Latino earns 73 cents. (The economic state of Latinos in America: The American dream deferred | McKinsey). As we've already discussed in the Latino Observatory, the situation for Latino women is even worse: for every dollar a non-Latino white man earns, Hispanic women earn only 55 cents—the largest wage gap experienced by any major racial or ethnic group in the United States. This is a topic that deserves a more detailed analysis, because latinos are the group with the highest population growth in the country.