Job Loss

The loss of construction jobs by immigrants from Latin America contributed to a spike in unemployment among all Latino workers to 6.5 percent, compared with 4.7 percent unemployed for non-Latino workers, the report found. As recently as late 2006, Latino workers had achieved their historic low unemployment rate of 4.9 percent, based mainly on a job boom among immigrants, the report said. "To put it bluntly, Hispanics had a rough time in the labor market in 2007," said Rakesh Kochhar, the author of the report who is associate director for research at the Pew center, a nonpartisan organization in Washington.