Hispanic population growth
In recent years, the fastest Hispanic population growth has tended to come in areas with a relatively small number of Latinos. Thanks to a boom in Bakken shale oil production, North Dakota has some of the fastest-growing counties by Latino population in the United States. In 2019, there were 30,490 people with Hispanic descent living in North Dakota. California, on the contrary, with more than 15.5 million people in 2019, has been home to the largest Latino diaspora for many decades, ahead of such states as Texas and Florida.In regards to the origin countries of the Hispanic population, more than 37 million of the U.S. Hispanic population were of Mexican descent in 2019. The second largest Hispanic ethnic group was Puerto Rican, with about 5.8 million people residing in the United Sates. Cubans constituted the third largest Latino ethnic group with estimated 2.4 million people.
Language proficiency and employment
Most Hispanics are bilingual, speaking both Spanish and English. About 36 percent of foreign-born adults living in the U.S. said they could speak English “very well” in 2018. At the same time, roughly 43 percent stated that they spoke English less than “very well”.Language proficiency affects employability and income level. This could partly be the reason for the relatively high unemployment rate among the people with Hispanic ethnicity, which was 10.4 percent in 2020. In comparison, the average U.S. unemployment rate was 8.1 percent in the same year. In 2019, the median weekly earnings of a Latino full-time employee amounted to 706 U.S. dollars in the United States, which was below the national average.
