Latino Power Tracker

David Hayes-Bautista is one of the founders of the Latino Gross Domestic Product Project, which documents the economic contribution of Latinos in the U.S. economy. He is also director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture and professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California – Los Angeles. The center teaches medical students, residents and practicing providers to manage the care of a Latino patient base effectively, efficiently and economically. Last summer, Hayes-Bautista began to cross streams with the work done at California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, headed by Executive Director Matthew Fienup. The Latino GDP is research Hayes-Bautista began forging three years ago with the late Werner Schink, who had served as chief economist of the California Employment Development Department. After unofficially joining forces, Hayes-Bautista presented his data at Cal Lutheran’s 2018 Ventura County Economic Forecast Conference, which took place in October 2018. Based on 2015 data, the U.S. Latino gross domestic product was $2.13 billion, bigger than Mexico’s and the fifteenth largest in the world. Latino home-ownership saw a total net growth of 69 percent; and 86 percent business and job growth compared to the U.S.’s non-Latino population. The spending power and economic impact of U.S. Latinos, the nation’s largest minority group at 18 percent of the nation’s nearly 330,000,000 population, is enormous. Question: What happened after you and the late Werner Schink calculated the Latino GDP? Answer: We were surprised in what we saw. The size of the Latino GDP is bigger than entire GDP of Mexico, which is the fifteenth biggest economy. How and when did the partnership with CERF on the Latino GDP begin? We’re doing it in a joint partnership. We began discussing this in the summer 2018. Dan contacted me independently. Unfortunately, Werner had pancreatic cancer and passed away in mid-2018. Once he was diagnosed, we put the brakes on everything. Meanwhile, Dan Hamilton had contacted me independently and told me that he had moved out to Cal Lu. How would you describe this economic team? Dan Hamilton is kind of the nerd of the team. I’m confident of numbers myself. I bring in other expertise linking it to other social and economic dynamics. I had wanted to do the Latino GDP for about 10 years. (Last year) Dan and I, we were being interviewed by a public TV in Seattle about the growth of household income between 2016 and 2017, when the overall household income grew by 2 percent whereas Latino household income grew about 70 percent faster. Why? It’s driven by consumer expenditures. Clearly, if household income is growing more, the members of the household spend more. If it’s shrinking, you’ll have smaller spending. If Latino household income is growing after that, we’re probably going to see a larger GDP. From that perspective, we expect to see some growth. I shared our model with (CERF) and Dan feels he can pick it up and continue so this can be an ongoing estimation starting off annually and eventually quarterly and even on a monthly level and (by different demographics). I’m not an economist and they (at CERF) felt confident they could pick it up. What will be the next step? Like everything else, it takes resources. Latino Donor Collaborative is pulling together the funds. We gave them an estimate. Right now, Cal Lu is in the process of finalizing a contract with LDC and their sponsors. We’re all confident that we’ll have an estimate by late September or early October. Can you distinguish between Latinos who are U.S. citizens and those who are undocumented to arrive at your statistics? You can’t because the data is based on Census Bureau or Bureau of Economic Research statistics and those agencies don’t ask those questions. However, who are the workers in the fields? Primarily undocumented immigrants. As we look at median household income, we can determine which are headed by documented citizens and which are undocumented. Would determining such micro-data prove helpful? It would be useful. I’ve created a demographic model from 1769 to 2015 (that shows) eight waves of immigration from Mexico to the United States. We had a wave of immigrants from 1965 to 2000 and then it petered out but in turn they had children born in the U.S. Now they’re Millennials and Post-Millennials and while their parents had very little education, their kids are graduating from high school and college. They’re bringing a greater amount of human capital into this country. Their kids are basically replacing them in the labor force with much more human capital, 95 percent of them U.S.-born. What do you feel is presently driving Latino growth? Immigration has been virtually flat since 2005. Right now, it’s at about 1 million a year; Latino babies are born in California, about 250,000 a year; that’s what’s driving the growth. We’ve seen a wave of immigration, then a wave of births. That’s normal. Growth in Mexico has slowed down. How about economically? Probably the most eye-popping gains were in 2007 and 2012. While non-Latino businesses shrank by 2 percent, Latino businesses grew by 47 percent. This from the depth of the recession when credit was tight, while everyone else is stagnant and shrinking. For me that’s just staggering. In which industries are Latinos showing growth? Primarily in services. Primarily immigrants. Their children are now coming out of high school and going to college so they’re entering at much higher levels of human capital than their parents have. They’re citizens, highly educated. For about the next 20 years, those sectors will be buoyed by Latinos as consumers. Latinos make up a huge portion of theatrical movie-going audiences, so why hasn’t Hollywood created the Latino equivalent of “Black Panther” or “Crazy Rich Asians”? There’s a huge disparity and dearth of Latino representation and yet there’s a market waiting to be tapped. On Spanish television, they are catering to the immigrant parent but not the U.S.-born children. So there’s a huge market waiting to be tapped. Do you feel the Latino community is making in-roads in the entertainment industry? So far, no. (Mexican-American) movie producer Moctesuma Esparza (“Selena,” “Gods and Generals”) said that it was better for Latinos in the 1950s than it is now. Even though we like to think, “Wow, we have ‘Roma,’” the 1950s were a lot better.