Latinos will make up a majority of California’s labor force by the next decade, according to a new report.
The study, released by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture (CESLAC) and titled “Latino Bright Spot in California’s Population Gloom: How the Latino Labor Force Grows,” found that growing Latino workforce participation results from higher birth rates, a younger population and greater health outcomes than the overall population.
Currently, Latinos make up around 40% of California’s labor force, up from 32% in 2005.
Throughout the 1980s, Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, the director of CESLAC and head author of the new study, projected that in California by 2030, there would be 14.8 million Latinos, and that Latinos would be 42% of the state’s population.
“This is exactly what happened,” he said. “This report is the modern update of that prediction.”
Between 2018 and 2023 alone, there were over 1.2 million Latino births in California; this is the cohort expected to enter the state’s labor force between 2034 and 2040, per the report.
The current Latino population statewide is 40% — over 15 million people.
For every U.S.-born Latino that dies in California, nearly three are born. For every U.S.-born non-Hispanic white person who dies, by contrast, half a baby is born.
Despite this, Latino fertility rates today are still lower than baby boomer fertility rates in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
“So it’s not like Latinos are breeding like rabbits,” explained Hayes-Bautista. “It’s that fertility for whites is way below replacement.” A new report from the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute in fact shows that for the first time in history immigrants accounted for year-on-year population growth in the US.
Adds Hayes-Bautista, “Because whites were born during the baby boom, they started leaving the labor force in 2010.”
That timing coincides with an unprecedented number of U.S.-born Latinos newly entering the workforce.
Nationwide, Hispanics are the fastest-growing worker group, comprising roughly two-thirds of the overall workforce increase between 2003 and 2023, and growing over 10 times more than non-Hispanic groups over that time.
The report also found behavioral trends in that Latinos are more likely to join the private sector, work more hours per week and more weeks per year.
Hayes-Bautista traces these trends back to 1940.
Meanwhile, birth rates are lowering increasingly worldwide, from Europe to Japan to China, and even many Latin American countries.
So what is unique to U.S. Latinos that is improving population and health ahead of other demographics?
The report supports an epidemiological observation often described as the “Hispanic paradox,” whereby Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes similar to or better than their non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanic people have lower average income, education and health care access, with higher rates of disability and chronic diseases.
U.S. Hispanics have a 24% lower risk of mortality for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death compared to non-Hispanic whites, according to a 2015 Center for Disease Control study.
“Latinos tend to have a very low percentage of low-birth-weight babies, and infant mortality virtually identical with whites. They smoke less, drink less and do drugs less than whites,” said Dr. Hayes-Bautista. “It’s a paradox, given that Latinos have less income, less education and horrible access to care.”
The challenge is that because of these paradoxical outcomes, the usual models used to predict a population’s health have “no power” for Latinos, he continued — making social factors even more critical.
“There seem to be Latino ways of behavior that we need to better understand,” he explained. “And it has nothing to do with critical race theory or white privilege or anything else. It’s about developing better-working data models.”
“People tell me to stop studying Latino health, because that’s DEI,” he continued. “I say: You want to reduce your risk for heart disease by 30%? Then we need to understand this mechanism. If a pharmaceutical company could achieve a 5% reduction through a randomized clinical trial, people would think the millennium were here. Thirty percent consistently — that is amazing.”
Despite similar barriers and achievement gaps for U.S. Latinos in the educational sphere, educational attainment is now skyrocketing for the younger generation of U.S. Latinos.
California is the world’s fifth-largest economy; considering the even larger portion of its workforce that Latinos will fill in the coming years, a concentrated effort needs to be made to help Latinos achieve higher education, Hayes-Bautista said.
In the 2010-2011 academic year, the high school graduation rate for U.S. Latinos was 71%. In the 2018-2019 academic year, it was 82%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Higher education disparities still persist: as of 2019, about 18% of Hispanics aged 25 and older had obtained a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 40% of non-Hispanic Whites.
However, a more recent study of Hispanic men found that college enrollment rates had increased from 28% to 30% from 2010 to 2020, while rates for White men fell in that period from 41% vs. 37%.
This slow nationwide growth is even more challenging in California, 26 years since the state struck down affirmative action in public universities.
In the 1998-1999 school year, for instance, enrollment among Black and Latino students at UCLA and UC Berkeley fell 40%.
Hayes-Bautista’s advice for California’s growth? Get as many Latinos as possible into higher education.
“The growth of Latino GDP is the growth spot for US GDP. Latinos give the US something no other advanced industrial economy has, which is labor force growth,” he explained.
“China, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the U.K. — none of them have native-born labor force growth, because they have below replacement level birth. Only the U.S. and India do,” he continued. “In fact, the Latino GDP is larger than the entire economy of India.”
Regarding the current moment in American politics, Hayes-Bautista dismissed the idea that President Trump’s deportations, immigration restrictions and DEI bans are affecting these trends, because the study highlights long-term trends among U.S.-born Latinos.
“We should be investing like crazy in Latino health and in the Latino labor force,” he said. “Latinos are the last best chance for the U.S. to maintain its economic preeminence throughout the 21st century.”
