The Paradox of Hispanic Unemployment: Evidence and Explanations for an Immigrant Employment Advantage

Jennifer Laird, University of Washington

Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I present evidence for a Hispanic employment paradox. Given their educational and occupational attainment, Hispanic immigrant men should have had very high unemployment during the recession. Compared to native-born men, they are on average, considerably less educated, over represented in high-unemployment construction occupations, and geographically clustered in the regions where employment plummeted during the recession. I find that after controlling for education and occupation, Hispanic immigrant men had lower probabilities of unemployment than native-born white men. I test three possible explanations for the paradox: differential rates of underemployment, lack of access to unemployment benefits, and the positive selection of migrants for employment. None of these explanations fully account for the paradox, although non-citizen Hispanic men – many of whom do not have access to unemployment benefits because they are undocumented – were the least likely to be unemployed.