Most of US visas go to Hispanic migrants, the economy depends on it

The U.S. gave a lion share of its immigrant visas to Hispanic and Latin American immigrants over the last 10 years due largely to the need for immigrant workers its service, agriculture and construction sectors.

The U.S. approved a little over 5.4 million immigrant visas in the last decade alone and about a quarter of them went to three Hispanic and Latin American countries alone - Mexico, Dominican Republic and El Salvador, immigration data has shown.

However, these are not the only Hispanic and Latin American countries where legal immigrants came from in that period. These three are just part of the top 10 countries which America attracted with visas to shore up its labor force. These ‘special’ immigrant countries got more than half of all the immigrant visas in that period.

Hispanic population in the US has steadily grown over the last decade - over 20 percent. A Pew researchputs the population of immigrants of Hispanic origin at 62.1 million - almost a fifth of the U.S. population.

While looking at the data around labor force participation in relation to population, it is easily noticeable that despite the Hispanic population being a huge chunk of the US population, labor force participation of immigrants of Hispanic or Latino origin is still low relative to their population.

However the Department of Labor offers an explanation. It explains in a note on the labor force data page that the figure represents those who identify only as Hispanics not of mixed race.

With a population of about 332 million (2021 estimate), the U.S. civilian labor force is just a little above half of that, according to 2020 figures from the Department of Labor.

But despite legal immigrants making up less than 20 percent of the labor force, their participation in many sectors/occupations far outweighs their population ratio.

The participation of Hispanics in some of these sectors are even considerably higher if one takes into account undocumented workers.

For instance, even though this Department of Labor puts the participation in the farming, fishing and forestry occupations at 31 per cent, studies like this one from the University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture puts the population of Hispanic workers at over 50 percent of farm workers in the U.S.

For this story, I decided to limit my datasets to the years from 2010 to 2020 because labor shortages brought about by the pandemic would have made figures from 2020 till date incomparable because of likely suspension of visa approvals at US embassies and disruption in the economy and effect on employment rates.

Looking at the data for sectors where Hispanic immigrants have the lowest representation, I found that they are mostly specialized field.

This highlights the 'quid pro quo' of the high U.S. visa approval rates in Hispanic and Latin America countries.

As I do more digging on this story, I would endeavor to find the correlation between rates of employment of Hispanic workers in specific sectors and the growth or revenue generation of such sectors.

Datasets and an analysis notebook can be found in this repository on Github.