In Houston and across the U.S., Latinos are growing and spending at higher rates than non-Latino residents, a new report found.
The Metro Latino GDP Report found that Latinos living in the Houston metro area contributed $139.5 billion, or 25 percent, to the local economy in 2021, making the Latino GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, as large as the entire economy of the state of Arkansas.
In the Houston metro area, which encompasses The Woodlands and Sugar Land, 2.8 million people, or 38 percent, identify as Latinos out of a population of 7.2 million, according to 2021 U.S. Census data. Houston’s Latino population is the fourth-largest in the nation and the largest in Texas.
One of the principal goals of the report is to buck the common negative misconceptions of the impact of Latinos in the U.S., said David Hayes-Bautista, author of the report and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health & Culture at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine.
Mainstream media often portrays this portion of the population only when talking about immigration, crime or strained resources, Hayes-Bautista said, impacting the popular belief and skewing the opportunities given to these residents based on those misconceptions.
“There is another story about Latinos that you don’t hear about, and this is based on data, based on numbers,” Hayes-Bautista said. “And it’s a very different portrait of growth, hard work, strong families, industriousness, patriotism.”
This rapid growth can be attributed to the economic mobility achieved through education, Hayes-Bautista said. As more Latinos enroll in higher education or earn certificates that move them up in the workforce, they earn more money for themselves and their families.
“A U.S.- born Latino has a median age of 21, and they have human capital that their parents might not have enjoyed,” he said. “They are U.S. citizens, they are fluently bilingual, about 95 percent here in Houston graduated from high school… and about two-thirds go on to college.”
Despite Latinos being one of the groups hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, the total economic output of the Latino population in the U.S. during 2021 was $3.2 trillion, up from $2.8 trillion in 2020, the report states.
If the U.S. Latinos were their own country, its GDP would be the fifth largest in the world, larger than the total economic output of India, the United Kingdom and France.
“Latinos in the U.S. represent a consumption market larger in size than the entire economy of nations like Italy or Canada,” the report states. “From 2010 to 2021, Latino real consumption grew 3.0 times faster than Non-Latino, driven by rapid gains in Latino income.”
The researchers started doing these reports at the national level, then slowly started adding states where there’s a large number of Latinos. That led to Bank of America sponsoring the research at the local level where they were seeing interest in this knowledge, Hayes-Bautista said.
Exploring the Houston metro area and its booming Latino population made for perhaps not surprising, but interesting findings, he said.
“We kind of expected to see what we did, which is Latinos are leading the charge in every single growth compound,” he said.
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