The New Latinos: Who They Are, Where They Are

Current Population Survey 6.1% 14.0% 4,942,000

* Based on 35.3 million Hispanics in Census 2000


As Table 2 shows, the estimates of the number of Central and South Americans are very different in these three sources: 3 million in Census 2000 (which classed 17.6% as Other Hispanic), a million more in the Census 2000 Supplemental Survey conducted at the same time (based on a sample of nearly 700,000 and which classed only 9.6% as Other Hispanic), and almost another million in the March 2000 Current Population Survey (with a sample of about 120,000 and only 6.1% Other Hispanic).

In this report we present improved estimates of the size of New Latino groups, compared to relying solely on the Hispanic origin question in Census 2000. Our procedure uses the Current Population Survey, which has the advantage of being conducted in person or by telephone, as the basis for determining what is the percentage of Hispanics who "really" should be classified as Other Hispanic. We then apply this target to Census 2000 data at the level of census tracts. Where the census has an excessive number of Other Hispanics, we allocate them across specific national origin groups according to a pre-established formula. Details of the procedure for 1990 and 2000 are documented in the Appendix to this report.


New Latinos in the United States, 1990 and 2000

Table 3 provides a detailed breakdown of the Hispanic population at the national level (not including Puerto Rico) in 1990 and 2000. There are very large disparities between these and the Census counts from the Hispanic origin question, especially in 2000.

In absolute numbers, the Mexicans are the group most affected by our reallocation of Other Hispanics, increasing by 2.4 million from the Census count. In proportion to their number, however, it is the New Latinos for whom the figures are most changed. Taken together the Mumford estimates show that New Latinos more than doubled their number, compared to an increase of about a third reported by the Census Bureau. We calculate more than 350,000 additional Dominicans and Salvadorans, 270,000 additional Colombians, and 250,000 additional Guatemalans.

· By all estimates, Mexicans are by far the largest Hispanic
group, about two-thirds of the total and still growing rapidly. The Mumford count is now over 23 million, an increase of 70% in the last decade.

· Puerto Ricans and Cubans remain the next largest Hispanic
groups, but their expansion is now much slower, up 35% and 23% respectively since 1990.

· The largest New Latino groups are Dominicans and Salvadorans,
both of whom doubled in the last decade and have now reached over 1.1 million.

· There are now over a half million Colombians (nearly 750,000)
andGuatemalans (over 600,000) in this country. And three other groups are quickly approaching the half million mark: Ecuadorians, Peruvians, and Hondurans.


Table 3. Estimates of the Hispanic population in the
United
States, 1990 and 2000 (SEE ATTACHED DOCUMENT)


States with the largest New Latino populations

There are growing numbers of New Latinos in most states, but about three-quarters of them are found in just five states: New York, California, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas. Table 4 lists the 16 states with more than 100,000 New Latinos in 2000. The table provides a broad categorization of their origins in terms of Dominican, Central American, and South American.

For reference it also shows the populations of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. The Mumford Center webpage provides more detailed breakdowns for all 50 states, including both 1990 and 2000 and both Mumford estimates and counts from the Census Bureau.

· New York State has the most New Latinos (close to 1.4 million,
up from 800,000 in 1990). About half (650,000) are Dominicans, who have had a noticeable presence in New York City since the 1950s. Close to half a million are various South American countries, a much newer immigrant stream. Puerto Ricans were once the predominant source of Hispanic immigration. Now they account for barely more than a third of the state's Hispanics, and they are outnumbered by New Latinos.

· California has almost as many New Latinos as New York (also
close to 1.4 million), though they are greatly outnumbered by Mexicans. The largest share - over a million - are from Central America, including especially El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

· Florida's Hispanic population is well distributed among many
national-origin groups. The Cubans are by far the best known of these at a national level (and they are still the largest, with nearly 900,000 residents statewide). Yet their growth has been slower than other groups, and nearly an equal number now are New Latinos (850,000), weighted toward South American origins. There are also over half a million Puerto Ricans and close to 400,000 Mexicans.

· Because of its proximity to New York, New Jersey's Hispanic
population might be expected to mirror that of its neighbor. It is
similar,
in that Puerto Ricans still are about a third of them (385,000). And
Puerto
Ricans are now outnumbered for the first time by New Latinos (over
500,000).
The difference is that a much smaller share in New Jersey is Dominican;
about half of the state's New Latinos are from South America.

· Finally, Texas now has 400,000 New Latinos, more than doubling
since
1990. As is true of California, the largest share is from Central America,
especially El Salvador. They are barely noticeable statewide, next to 6
million of Mexican origin. But as will be shown below they are most
heavily
concentrated in Houston, where they are about a sixth of the Hispanic
population.


Table 4. States with more than
100,000 New Latinos in 2000 (SEE ATTACHED DOCUMENT)

Metropolitan regions with the largest New Latino populations

The New Latino population lives almost entirely within metropolitan
regions. Table 5 lists the 23 metro areas (MSA's and PMSA's) with more than 50,000 in 2000. The Mumford Center webpage provides more detailed data for all metro areas in the nation.

Table 5. Metropolitan regions with more than 50,000
New Latinos in 2000 (SEE ATTACHED DOCUMENT)

Some parts of the country deserve special attention:

· The entire region surrounding New York City - including the New
York, Nassau-Suffolk, Newark, Jersey City, Bergen-Passaic, and
Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon metro areas - is the most important focal point for New Latino immigration. The New York PMSA alone has over 1.1 million, and the surrounding and largely suburban metro areas add another half million. Dominicans are about half of these in the New York PMSA. Central Americans (especially Salvadorans) are more than half of the New Latinos in suburban Long Island. In Northern New Jersey, many specific groups are present, but a plurality is South American.

· Los Angeles-Long Beach is the center for New Latino immigration
in Southern California, where it has a mostly Central American flavor (300,000 Salvadorans, nearly 200,000 Guatemalans). In nearby metro areas (Riverside-San Bernardino and Orange County) New Latinos are also plentiful, but they tend to be dwarfed by the huge and growing Mexican population. 

· In Miami and neighboring Fort Lauderdale there are about 600,000 New Latinos. They are about evenly split between Central and South Americans in Miami, and more tilted toward South Americans in Fort Lauderdale.

· Washington, DC is the next great center for New Latino growth
(over 300,000). About two-thirds are Central American (130,000 Salvadorans) and one-third South American.

· Finally, Houston has 200,000 New Latinos, of whom the largest
share is Salvadoran (90,000).

New Latinos: Present and Future

The scale of immigration from less traditional Hispanic sources brings new and less known groups into the United States. Within ten years, we need to become as aware of Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Colombians - people with very different backgrounds and trajectories - as we are of Puerto Ricans and Cubans.

Because they are so highly concentrated in a few regions, and often in a fairly narrow set of neighborhoods within those regions, each group has special local significance in those places. There are two ways in which accurate knowledge about New Latino groups is most critical.

One is in the realm of political representation. Public officials and
leaders of political parties need to be aware of changes in their
constituencies. Although political redistricting is not required to take
into account the internal composition of the Hispanic population, surely some choices about where to draw lines, whom to support for public office, and what issues to highlight in public policy initiatives will depend on whether the constituency remains more Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban, and to what extent it is becoming Dominican, Salvadoran, or Colombian.

The other is in the provision and targeting of public services.
Particularly since so many services are now provided through non-profit organization, often seeking to serve specific ethnic populations, it is important for public officials to know who are the clients in a given locale. Again, whether the client base remains more Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban, and to what extent it is shifting toward one or more of the New Latino groups, should reasonably be expected to affect judgments about how to serve the Hispanic community.

The serious inadequacies of the Hispanic origin question in Census 2000 require that alternative estimates be made available. Undercounted can too easily translate into underserved. The Mumford Center offers one approach.

Our procedure makes maximum use of publicly available data, it can be replicated, and it offers usable figures at the level of individual census tracts. We encourage others to assess the plausibility of these estimates and to seek better methods of estimation. In particular, we encourage the Bureau of the Census to use the whole range of data that it has on hand for this purpose. Information from the Supplemental Survey or the long form of Census 2000 on country of birth and ancestry, taken together with the Hispanic origin question, would allow the Bureau to create a new composite variable for a large sample of the population. This new composite variable would provide an excellent estimate of Dominican, Central American, and South American populations for the nation and for many states and large metropolitan regions - clearly better than our adjustment procedure.

Such data would also make possible a substantial refinement of our tract-level estimates. We urge the Bureau to begin consideration of these and other ways in which the resources of the decennial census could be more fully applied to understanding the composition of America's Hispanic population.

Decline of Latino Groups in Census Has Agencies Angry, Experts Puzzled
(excerpt)
By ROBIN FIELDS, Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2001.

Local organizations say the county's Salvadoran population at least doubled in the last decade, but the census shows Salvadorans declining 26% from 253,086 in 1990 to 187,193 in 2000.

"I don't think that can be accurate," said Carlos Vaquerano, executive director of the Salvadoran-American Leadership and Educational Fund. "We've taken a lot of pride in being the second-largest Latino group here and the fastest-growing. We expected the census to prove that."

The effect of the paper reductions could be devastating, he added. Growing communities, with burgeoning economic and political clout, attract more corporate investment and marketing attention, as well as more government aid.

APPENDIX: Mumford Estimates of Hispanic-Origin Populations

The adjustment procedures described here are analogous to standard techniques employed by the Bureau of the Census to deal with incomplete census forms. The Bureau routinely "imputes" information from other household members or from neighbors in order to fill in missing data. The difference is that our adjustment is done at the level of the census tract. To the extent that we believe the tract's Other Hispanic population has been overstated, we impute specific national origins to the "excess Other Hispanics" based on the distribution of responses of others in the tract.

1. Estimates for 1990

We first describe our approach to 1990. The Public Use Microdata Sample(PUMS) from the 1990 census provides individual-level information for a large national sample on Hispanic origin, country of birth, and ancestry.

In the PUMS sample, 8.7% of Hispanics are classed as Other Hispanic. If we also use country of birth and ancestry as a basis for determining individuals' specific Hispanic origin, we can reduce Other Hispanics to 7.5%. For some specific states or metropolitan areas, however, we can do much better, reducing Other Hispanics to less than 1.5% of Hispanics in New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

We treat these estimates of the "real" size of the Other Hispanic category as targets, setting a specific target for every census tract. For tracts in metro areas with more than 100,000 Hispanics (39 metro areas), we calculate the target from data for the metro area itself. In other cases, we apply statewide figures. For the 31 states with less than 100,000 Hispanics, we apply the national target of 7.5%.

We then turn to the figures from the 1990 census, comparing our target for every census tract to the number of Other Hispanics reported by the census. 

If the reported number is equal to or below the target, we make no
adjustment. If it is larger than the target, we allocate the number of
"excess" other Hispanics to specific national origin categories based on the reported figures in the tract for those categories.

NOTE: Analysis of 1990 PUMS data reveals that people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban birth or ancestry were much less likely (by a factor of 1:4) to fail to indicate an origin than were Hispanics of other backgrounds, a result that we attribute to the questionnaire format. It is appropriate to allocate some Other Hispanics to these listed groups, but not in the same proportion as for unlisted groups.

In allocating Other Hispanics, therefore, we weight members of the listed groups in each tract at .25; this procedure generates national totals that are consistent with the national group populations found in the PUMS. 

2. Estimates for 2000

Our procedure for 2000 follows the same logic, but draws on a differentsource for calculating targets. The public use sample from the Census 2000 is not yet publicly available. Therefore we use the smaller Current Population Survey, pooling together the samples from March 1998 and March 2000. The Census Bureau, using either the Census 2000 Supplemental Survey or the long-form data from Census 2000, is in a position to provide superior estimates, and we encourage the Bureau to do so. By 2002 or 2003, when additional files will have been publicly released, we will update our own adjustments.

Nationally, information on the person's country of birth and both parents' country of birth from the CPS allows us to reduce the target to 3.3% - well below the 17.3% reported in the decennial census. These targets also vary by state and metro area. For CMSA's with more than 400 sampled Hispanics, we use CMSA figures to calculate targets (this covered 67 PMSA's). For other cases we employ statewide figures or, where a state has less than 400 sampled Hispanics, we use the national target. In some cases the targets are even lower than 3.9%: they are 2.4% in New York, 1.1% in Los Angeles. This procedure reallocates a very large share of people who were reported as "other Hispanics" in Census 2000.

As in 1990, we allocate a substantial number of Other Hispanics to Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban. The weighting factor for these groups is .10, calibrated to yield national totals that are consistent with the CPS. 

Substantively this weight means we are estimating that member of other groups were ten times more likely to fail to indicate their origin, a greater discrepancy than in 1990. In our view, the difference reflects the fact that the Census 2000 questionnaire provided no examples to guide respondents from the unlisted groups, examples that proved helpful in 1990.

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