By Donna Kato
Mercury News

Here’s more proof of the growing buying power of Latinos.

The U.S. Hispanic online audience climbed 50 percent faster than the overall Hispanic population in the past year, according to a new study by comScore, a global Internet information provider. The online Hispanic audience in February hit 20.3 million, up 6 percent from a year ago. It now accounts for 11 percent of the total U.S. online market.

“It’s well-known that the Hispanic market is a growing and increasingly important segment to advertisers and marketers,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. “However, any business attempting to effectively reach this segment needs to understand the behavior of the U.S. Hispanic online consumer as a fundamental component of their marketing and media strategies.”

Hispanics also outpaced the general Internet population in growth in total minutes spent online, total pages viewed and total visits. Entertainment and community sites are strong draws for Hispanics. The single most popular category in terms of time spent was teen community sites, which attracted 18 percent of U.S. Hispanics.

Since the U.S. Hispanic population skews young, it wasn’t surprising that teen-focused sites would be the top category in time spent, said Alicia Morga, CEO of Consorte Media, a digital marketing firm focusing on the Hispanic market. She noted that social networking site hi5 is among the most popular for U.S. Hispanic users.

Popularity: 49% [?]

Luis Uribe–EFE

California will face a shortage of close to a million university-graduate professionals by 2025, according to a new report that attributes the phenomenon to the retirement of baby boomers and the increase in the Latino population.

“California’s Education Skills Gap: Modest Improvements Could Yield Big Gains,” a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, reveals that many of those born between 1946 and 1964 will have retired by 2025, leaving a shortage of professionals.

Meanwhile the new generations of Californians include a high number of Latinos who historically have a low level of university education.

The California economy will need nearly a million more university graduates by 2025 than what demographic studies now foresee.

The state’s public institutes of higher learning currently produce a little more than 110,000 graduates per year, while private colleges contribute another 40,000.

California colleges and universities must increase their number of graduates by close to 60,000 a year, around 40 percent above the present level in order to fulfill expected demand by the year 2025, a very difficult goal according to the study.

“California faces a critical challenge,” according to PPIC Associate Director Hans Johnson, who co-authored the report with Ria Sengupta.

“But the good news is the state can dramatically improve the prospects for its economic growth and the futures of its young adult residents with relatively modest investments in the pathways students take to college graduation,” Johnson said.

In 2005 there were some 5.7 million university graduates between the ages of 25 and 64, and the PPIC analysis estimates that between 2005-2025 the state will produce 5.4 million new professionals with bachelor’s degrees, of which 3.3 million will come from California universities while 2.1 million will come from out of state.

In the same period, 3 million university graduates will retire from the work force because of their age, for a net total of 8.1 million graduates in 2025 aged between 25 and 64.

The analysis underscores that the California State University System has more than twice as many students as the University of California system.

But while five out of every six UC students graduate in a maximum six-year period, only about half of CSU students do so in the same amount of time.

The analysis shows that if CSU’s graduation rate is raised from 50 to 62 percent and if the UC graduation rate is increased by around 5 percent, the number of university graduates can increase by more than 200,000 by the year 2025.

“Increasing graduation rates is also a promising fiscal approach. The state has already invested in these students’ higher education, and keeping them in college a bit longer is less expensive than other options,” the report says.

Another opportunity suggested by the study is stepping up the transfer of students from community colleges to universities, since more than 70 percent of students in state higher-education institutes attend a community college, but only 20 to 30 percent of them ever transfer to a four-year college.

“Increasing the transfer rate by 22 percent would add more than 100,000 new college graduates by 2025,” PPIC maintains.

It also stresses the need to raise the number of high-school graduates who go straight into university in California, which is in 40th place among all the states in the country in that regard with 55 percent.

“Gradually raising the first-time college attendance rate to 61 percent — the national average - would increase the number of college graduates by more than 100,000 by 2025,” the study says.

It also mentions the need to offer greater economic aid to finance university costs — calculated at $25,000 per year for UC universities — as well as improving students’ grade scores and preparation.

Popularity: 47% [?]

The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation support the legalization of the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants and the creation of a panel to analyze the labor market’s needs.

By Anna Gorman
LA Times

The nation’s top two labor federations announced a framework Tuesday for comprehensive immigration reform, setting aside differences with the hope of pushing legislation through this year.

The agreement, supported by the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation, supports the legalization of the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants and the formation of an independent commission to analyze the labor market’s needs and assess shortages for the admission of future foreign workers. The unions oppose any new guest worker programs that would allow employers to bring foreigners in on a temporary basis.

“Today’s unified agreement by the labor movement is a major step forward to pass immigration reform,” Eliseo Medina, international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said during a phone news conference. “We believe that the time is right for finally reforming our immigration system.”

The labor unions, however, will probably face opposition from business groups.

Randel Johnson of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said he was suspicious about a commission that could become politicized and concerned that businesses would not be able to get the employees they needed without temporary worker programs. Without the backing of business, he said, immigration reform won’t pass.

The unions “do need our support,” said Johnson, the chamber’s vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits. “They know the reality, and they are pretending it doesn’t exist.”

President Obama says he intends to pursue immigration reform, even though the country is in a recession that could make it harder for legislation to pass.

An immigration bill failed in the Senate in 2007. The unions were divided on the best approach at the time.

“We’ve found in the past division hasn’t helped any of us,” said Ana Avendano, director of the Immigrant Worker Program at the AFL-CIO. “What division has done in the past is really fueled both anti-immigrant hatred and helped business to move an agenda that really only benefited corporations.”

Labor leaders said they planned to begin meeting with members of Congress to market their proposal. They also said they intended to work with community groups, churches and civil rights groups.

Immigrant rights groups also plan to hold news conferences, town hall meetings and hearings across the nation to mobilize support for reform and to highlight what they say is the harm caused by a lack of legislation.

“We will do whatever it takes, whatever is necessary, to really encourage our legislators and encourage the people of the United States to really support this position,” said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers.

The unions support the creation of a worker verification program that would determine whether employees are authorized to work in the U.S., while preventing discrimination and providing privacy protections.

In addition, the unions included border security as a tenant of their plan but wrote in the agreement that enforcement should not be the responsibility of local law enforcement and should focus on “criminal elements.”

Popularity: 48% [?]

By Phil Willon and David Zahniser
LA Times

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday laid out a second-term agenda weighted heavily toward the creation of environmentally friendly jobs to rescue Los Angeles from its economic malaise but warned of serious pain ahead as the city digs out of a half-billion-dollar budget shortfall.

Delivering his fourth State of the City speech since taking office, Villaraigosa’s remarks struck the tone of a Democratic candidate for governor, with scorching critiques of both Sacramento lawmakers and Washington conservatives.

Villaraigosa denounced the “politics of no” as he called for a green technology hub along the west side of the Los Angeles River to attract new jobs and start-up companies.

“We need to build a future in which clean technology is as synonymous with Los Angeles as motion pictures or aerospace,” said the mayor, appearing at the Harbor City factory of Balqon Corp., which manufactures electric big-rigs for use at the city’s ports.

During his 33-minute address, Villaraigosa also promised to provide care for families decimated by job losses and foreclosures, to turn over failing L.A. schools to charter operators and to press ahead with his expansion of the Los Angeles Police Department. Portions of his ambitious agenda hinge on the city securing hundreds of millions of dollars from President Obama’s stimulus package.

By focusing so heavily on environmental themes, Villaraigosa delivered an upbeat message to accompany the dire scenario City Hall now faces: an estimated $530-million hole in its upcoming budget, two pension systems severely battered by investment losses and a city workforce that is being asked to choose between wage reductions or layoffs of thousands of employees.

“He found a way to give a realistic speech while still finding opportunities to be optimistic,” said Villaraigosa ally Richard Katz, who serves with the mayor on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Villaraigosa called on the city’s powerful public-employee unions to embrace wage and benefit concessions, saying it was the only path to prevent layoffs and protect city services. The mayor, who will release his 2009-10 budget Monday, called for immediate action and warned residents that the budget shortfall could grow to nearly $1 billion next year.

At least one union leader was cool to the mayor’s suggestion, saying that his members preferred early retirement packages and “no steps backwards” on existing contracts. “The mayor’s proposals are off base,” Bob Schoonover, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 721, said in a statement.

As a centerpiece of his speech, Villaraigosa reintroduced his plan for a “green” industry corridor just east of downtown that would serve as a spawning ground for environmentally conscious businesses. The speech echoed Villaraigosa’s message during his recent reelection campaign, when he promised to make Los Angeles “the greenest big city in America.”

Over the last four years, Villaraigosa has pushed the Port of Los Angeles to replace up to 17,000 diesel trucks with cleaner-burning models. And at the Department of Water and Power, he has pressed officials to expand the utility’s reliance on renewable sources of energy — primarily wind, solar and geothermal power.

Villaraigosa’s green agenda, combined with his emphasis on public safety and concessions from public employee unions, could broaden his appeal to moderates in California, some political experts said.

“If you’re going to pick a statewide theme that will afford you safe ground, there’s probably no better topic now than the green movement and the environment,” said San Jose State political scientist Larry Gerston, who is keeping a close watch on the early political maneuvering of potential contenders in the 2010 governor’s race.

Still, Villaraigosa’s drive to create green jobs has hit some roadblocks in recent months. Measure B, the solar initiative that he backed in the March 3 election, narrowly went down to defeat despite the use of television commercials that featured the mayor.

Meanwhile, the union leader who largely conceived of the energy plan has been highly critical of Villaraigosa’s other environmental initiatives at the DWP, including efforts to secure solar power sources in the Mojave Desert and geothermal power in Imperial County. Brian D’Arcy, who heads the union that represents DWP workers, has also criticized some of Villaraigosa’s environmental allies, saying that they are more interested in their clean energy benefactors than they are in the needs of Los Angeles.

Either way, Villaraigosa’s emphasis on job creation and the environment only fueled speculation that he would use similar themes next year in a run for statewide office. “It sounded gubernatorial,” said City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who attended the speech.

Popularity: 38% [?]

By John Canalis,LB Press-Telegram

Rep. Linda Sanchez does not expect to make a dime from the book she wrote with her sister, Rep. Loretta Sanchez.

But the Lakewood Democrat says she hopes that “Dream in Color: How the Sanchez Sisters are Making History in Congress” inspires young Latinas to follow the path she and her sister walked to college, professional life and public service.

In many ways, “Dream in Color” is a 253-page ode to education and blue-collar parents who pushed their seven children to go to college and strive beyond the limitations - both real and perceived - that society places in front of the children of immigrants.

“My parents were extraordinary in terms of encouraging us to doing well in school,” Linda says by phone from Washington, D.C. “They saw education as key to a better life in this country. They were very involved in our schooling and extracurricular activities.”

A strong foundation at home helped the sisters, who are Mexican-American, overcome the stereotypes they sometimes battled at school.

Linda was once told by a high school counselor “not to apply to your college (UC Berkeley) because you’ll get pregnant” and drop out.

Her parents urged her to avoid distractions based on ignorance and focus on getting ahead.

“They really knew education was the path, even my father,” Linda says. “He wanted also for his girls to go to college, which was pretty forward thinking for the time.”

Though their father worked long hours as a mechanic, he always made time to attend his children’s events, such as Girl Scout meetings and Little League games.

“All of my brothers and sisters are college graduates and professionals and work and contribute to their communities,” Linda says. “They’re highly successful, but just not in public office.”

Loretta, according to the book, was identified as a leader among the seven early on, earning a family nickname, “The Warden.”

In a press release for the book, Loretta says that with seven children, “You have to keep control or chaos will ensue.”

“Dream in Color” was written over eight months last year with help from Princess Diana biographer Richard Buskin.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi penned the forward, saying in it that the story of the Sanchez sisters “renews my optimism in America’s future.”

The Sanchezes, who like Pelosi are Democrats, are the first sister act in the House of Representatives.

This was made possible when Linda was elected in 2003. Now 40, she represents Lakewood, Cerritos, Hawaiian Gardens, La Mirada, South Gate, Whittier and other areas.

She followed Loretta’s 1996 election. Now one of the most powerful Latinas in Congress, Loretta, 49, represents the sisters’ hometown, Anaheim, as well as Garden Grove, Santa Ana and a bit of Fullerton.

The book grew from questions the sisters routinely receive about their backgrounds, particularly when addressing Latino audiences. The story is told in back-and-forth quotes from each sister.

“Loretta and I are not different than most Latino families from humble backgrounds,” Linda says.

And that, she says, is the point of the book.

“Dream in Color” is on sale in bookstores and online.

One on the way

Linda, incidentally, says her widely publicized pregnancy is going well. Her first baby, with boyfriend Jim Sullivan, is due in mid- to late-May.

Popularity: 48% [?]

By JULIA PRESTON
NT Times

The number of American citizen children who have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant has increased rapidly since 2003, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

About four million American children have at least one parent who lacks legal immigration status, the group found. And 73 percent of all children of illegal immigrants are American citizens. In 2003, 2.7 million American children had parents without legal status. The increase stems from the relatively young age of the immigrants, who have children soon after they settle in the United States, the report said.

Children of illegal immigrants are more than twice as likely to live with two parents than children of United States citizens, according to the report. In all, about 8.8 million people in the United States are in families that include parents who are illegal immigrants and children who are American citizens.

About three-quarters of the nation’s illegal immigrants are Hispanic.

The findings are likely to be another point of contention between advocates for immigrants and groups that favor more aggressive immigration enforcement.

In the last two years of the Bush administration, immigration authorities stepped up raids in factories and immigrant communities, and a record 349,000 immigrants were deported in 2008.

Civil rights and advocacy groups protested that the raids were dividing families and leading to de facto deportations of children with American citizenship who went to live in their parents’ home countries. Groups that advocate stricter enforcement say that illegal immigrants who have been deported have the choice of taking their American children with them or leaving them in the United States.

In the first months of the Obama administration, the raids have slowed to a near halt. After an operation by immigration agents in February at an engine plant in Bellingham, Wash., Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a review to produce a new enforcement strategy, which she said would focus primarily on abusive employers instead of immigrant workers.

The Pew report, by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, analyzed census data from March 2008. It is the first time in five years that Pew has closely examined family situations of illegal immigrants. It used a method for estimating the number of illegal immigrants that is widely accepted, including by government researchers and groups favoring reduced immigration.

In all, 5.5 million children living in the United States have parents who are illegal immigrants, an increase of 1.2 million children since 2003, the report found. Nearly 7 percent of students in public elementary and secondary schools are children of illegal immigrants, the report said.

About one-third of children of illegal immigrants live in poverty, nearly double the 18 percent poverty rate for children of United States citizens, the report found. In 2007, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $36,000, substantially below the $50,000 median for citizens.

The report found signs that the rapid upward mobility long associated with new immigrants had stalled for the current generation of illegal immigrants.

“In contrast to other immigrants,” the report said, “undocumented immigrants do not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States.”

Popularity: 45% [?]

By Tim Hoover
The Denver Post

A bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get in-state tuition might make it out of a Senate committee early today because of one GOP lawmaker’s absence — a situation Republicans called a little too convenient.

Senate Bill 170, sponsored by Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, had appeared destined for failure on a 5-5 vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was to meet Friday morning.

Though Democrats hold a 6-4 majority on the committee, Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge, had said she would not support the bill, meaning it was likely to die on a tie vote.

But Sen. Abel Tapia, D-Pueblo, the chairman of the panel, on Tuesday called a committee meeting for 7:30 this morning.

The extra meeting today means a vote on Romer’s bill could take place without Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, who last week said he had family business that would require his absence from the Senate until Thursday. With Harvey gone, the bill could pass on a 5-4 vote.

The bill would allow students who have attended a Colorado high school for at least three years and graduated to get the in-state tuition rate at public colleges and universities. After a contentious debate last month, the Senate referred the legislation to the Appropriations Committee after Republicans raised concerns about its potential costs.

Supporters have said the bill has no impact on state revenue, but Keller’s opposition was seen as the death knell for the measure.

Tapia, a supporter of Romer’s bill, said he scheduled the meeting today because the committee, which did not meet last week, faced a large bottleneck of bills. He said the committee is likely to meet Thursday as well.

“Bills have backed up an awful lot,” Tapia said. “I tried to put as many bills as possible on the (committee’s agenda).”

Republicans, though, said the timing of today’s meeting was fishy in light of Harvey’s absence.

“The bill is coming up before other bills that have been on the appropriations (schedule) for a while,” said Sen. Mike Kopp, R-Littleton, also a member of the panel. “It does strike me as very suspicious.”

Harvey, reached by phone, said he had gone to Florida to help his wife prepare to put her father, who has Alzheimer’s disease, in a facility in Colorado.

“They (Democrats) are taking advantage of my personal family issues to reschedule the committee hearing and push the bill through,” he said.

Kopp said he would offer a motion in today’s meeting to postpone consideration of the bill until Harvey returned to Denver.

Would Tapia agree to that?

“Are they going to want to delay every other bill that they think they can stop?” he asked in response. “I don’t know what I would do. I would have to think about that.”

He said he recognized Republicans might be suspicious of his motives.

“I can imagine that the Republicans may think this is kind of a stealth thing,” Tapia said. “My job isn’t to send bills (to the committee schedule) with the intention of killing them.”

Popularity: 80% [?]

By Mario Solis-Marich

While most political attention lately has been focused on the high drama in Washington DC a more fundamental and important shift is occurring in Latino/a electoral districts nation wide. A great Latino wake has formed behind the clipper ship known as the Barrack Obama presidential campaign.

All over the country I have been hearing from and about young Latina/o Democratic and independent candidates who are readying themselves for upcoming election cycles. The candidates were either directly involved in the Obama campaign or participated, as millions did, in individual efforts that culminated in the Obama victory.

While most of the thirty-something and under crowd are completely unaffiliated to any of their local Democratic political machines, or are only tangentially tied to them, a few have already received embraces (most awkward) from Latino leadership. Those candidates who have not been already embraced by their local senior Latino leadership are in the process of attaching themselves to wider political coalitions.

Probably the most successful so far in building mainstream Democratic support is the most unlikely of the “Great Latino Wake”, an openly gay Latino who was formerly a registered Republican, Robert Garcia. Garcia is running for City Council in Long Beach, CA. Garcia is a center- left Democrat who has taken his local district by storm garnering the support of the strongest local Democratic political machine while remaining fresh and independent. (BTW the machine supporting Garcia is not a Latino apparatus.) Garcia is also the first of the Great Latino Wake to face the ballot box. On April 7th voters will decide whether to hand over some of the power of the 5th largest city in California , home to one of the worlds largest ports, to Garcia, a 31 year old Latino who proudly wears his immigrant roots on his sleeve.

Should Garcia win, and odds are slightly in his favor, he will not only take his local community by storm but he will inspire the dozens of younger Latino/a’s preparing for their campaigns.

While in some areas, notably Denver CO, senior Latino political leadership are warmly welcoming the young brood other Latino political landscapes are not behaving quite as hospitably. But the participants in the Great Latino Wake having witnessed the insurgent campaign of Barrack Obama are neither surprised nor dissuaded by the cold shoulder.

While many in Latino politics will constantly remind non Latinos who would discourage us that “demographics is destiny” we as veteran political Latinos must also not forget that so is the timing of those demographics.

Timing and demographics have finally crossed paths. The next five years are the next chapter in American Latino political history and Robert Garcia becomes the first shot across the bow for a new generation of Latino political leadership.

Mario Solis-Marich is a progressive radio talk show host that can be heard Sunday through Friday at www.GoToMario.com. If you would like to support Robert Garcia and the beginning of the great Latino Wake you can go to his site by clicking here and making a donation.

Popularity: 70% [?]

In a little-noticed act of political faintheartedness, the Obama administration has pulled back from nominating Thomas Saenz, a highly regarded civil-rights lawyer and counsel to the mayor of Los Angeles, to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

Mr. Saenz, the former top litigator in Los Angeles for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, was privately offered the job in January. The floating of his name led to fierce outbursts from anti-immigrant groups and blogs, which detest him for being so good at what he does.

He was a leader of the successful fight to block California’s Proposition 187, an unconstitutional effort to deny social services and schooling to illegal immigrants. He has defended Latino day laborers who were targets of misguided local crackdowns, from illegal police stings to unconstitutional anti-solicitation ordinances. An editorial in Investor’s Business Daily slimed Mr. Saenz by calling him “an open-borders extremist” and said Maldef wanted to give California back to Mexico.

None of it was true, but it was apparently too much for the White House. Mr. Saenz was ditched in favor of Maryland’s labor secretary, Thomas Perez, who has a solid record but is not as closely tied to immigrant rights.

Immigrant advocates are stuck with the sinking feeling that Mr. Obama’s supposed enthusiasm for immigration reform will wilt under pressure and heat. Representative Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, found it sadly unsurprising that a lawyer could be rejected for the nation’s top civil-rights job because he had stood up for civil rights. “In what other position do you find that your life experience, your educational knowledge and commitment to an issue actually hurts you?” he asked.

Mr. Obama may have avoided a nasty fight this time. But if he is ever going to win the battle to put 12 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, he will to have to confront and dismantle the core restrictionist argument: that being an illegal immigrant is an unpardonable crime, one that strips away fundamental protections and forgives all manner of indecent treatment.

The Constitution’s bedrock protections do not apply to just the native-born. The suffering that illegal immigrants endure — from raids to workplace exploitation to mistreatment in detention — is a civil-rights crisis. It cannot be left to fester while we wait for the big immigration bill that may or may not arrive under this president.

Mr. Saenz would have been an ideal candidate to reaffirm values that have been lost in the poisoned immigration debate, had Mr. Obama dared to nominate him.

Popularity: 87% [?]

By JESSE WASHINGTON – 15 hours ago

The ax fell without sound or shadow: Tatiana Gallego was suddenly called into human resources and laid off from her job as an admissions counselor for a fashion college.

“The way people tried to explain it to me was, I was the last one hired so I was the first one out,” said Gallego, 25, who had worked there for 17 months.

Last hired, first fired: This generations-old cliche rings bitterly true for millions of Latinos and blacks who are losing jobs at a faster rate than the general population during this punishing recession.

Much of the disparity is due to a concentration of Latinos and blacks in construction, blue-collar or service-industry jobs that have been decimated by the economic meltdown. And black unemployment has been about double the rate for whites since the government began tracking those categories in the early 1970s.

But this recession is cutting a swath through the professional classes as well, which can be devastating to people who recently arrived there.

Since the recession began in December 2007, Latino unemployment has risen 4.7 percentage points, to 10.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Black unemployment has risen 4.5 points, to 13.4 percent. White unemployment has risen 2.9 points, to 7.3 percent.

Gallego, whose parents were born in Colombia, graduated from the University of Rhode Island. Her mother is self-employed, and her stepfather works in construction.

She was stunned when she was told to pack up and leave by the end of the day because enrollment was down at her New York City school. She said she had recently received a positive performance review, and her bosses were planning to send her to a conference.

“Maybe I just don’t know that much about the business world, because I felt like I did more, I went above and beyond more than other people in my office did,” she said.

William Darity, a professor of economics and African-American studies at Duke University, said that “blacks and Latinos are relative latecomers to the professional world … so they are necessarily the most vulnerable.”

“We don’t have those older roots to anchor us in the professional world,” Darity said. “We don’t have the same nexus of contacts, the same kind of seniority.”

There are no recent government statistics that measure jobs lost by race and income. But Darity and others believe that professional Latinos and blacks are more likely to lose their jobs in the recession.

“Many times blacks and Latinos are the last to be hired, so naturally they are first to be fired,” said Jerry Medley, who has been in the executive search business for 30 years.

“Not saying that it’s racism,” Medley said, “but if a manager or a senior executive is looking at a slate of individuals and has to let one of them go, chances are he or she will not let the person go that they spend a lot of time with at the country club or similar places.”

The less wealth you have, the harder unemployment hits. Darity cited 2002 data that showed black households with a median net worth of $6,000, Latino households with a median of $8,000, and white households with a median of $90,000.

Philip Salter was creative director for a Chicago advertising firm where about 75 percent of the revenue came from a contract with a Fortune 500 company to create ads targeted at minorities. When the firm lost that contract plus two general-market accounts, Salter’s job evaporated.

“When companies cut back their ad dollars, minority budgets are where they start,” said Salter, 62, who is black. “Unfortunately in this business, most clients just view (minority advertising) as an overlay or meeting an obligation that social organizations might place on them.”

His last day was in January 2008. With alimony payments and two kids in college, Salter moved from his four-bedroom house into an apartment and has scraped by on consulting gigs.

Salter’s mother worked as a housekeeper, and his father was a custodian. Before his divorce, Salter’s stepdaughter and her four children lived with him for many years.

Professional blacks “don’t usually start out with an inheritance,” he said. “On top of that, quite often things happen in our families to cause us stress. An unexpected child or grandchild, drug problems. When you try to set aside money to put your kids through college, all of a sudden you have to say, ‘I can’t let this family member fall and become homeless.’

“I would say eight out of 10 people I know have a similar situation.”

Then there are those clinging to the bottom of the ladder, laid off from lower-paying jobs.

For them, “once the primary breadwinner loses his or her job, there isn’t much backup,” said Harry Holzer, former chief economist for the Department of Labor who now is a professor at Georgetown University and the Urban Institute.

The Great Depression ended after the government created a “safety net” of wide-ranging social-assistance programs. Since then, the overall unemployment rate peaked in 1981-1982, at 10.8 percent on a monthly basis, Holzer said.

Economists believe we could reach that level in the current recession, Holzer said — but he added that unlike in the 1980s, today the safety net has been largely dismantled by restrictions placed on welfare and unemployment eligibility.

“You worry about populations of concentrated poverty and having less access to the safety net,” Holzer said. “It could lead to social unrest, higher crime rates — no one knows.”

“It will obviously have an effect on the crime rate,” said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion, which recently issued a report stating that nonwhites are bearing the heaviest burden during the recession.

“There also are all sorts of health-related issues connected with that,” Wiley said. “We could see higher rates of everything from homicides to tuberculosis.”

As racism wanes and blacks and Latinos advance up the economic ladder, many cite this progress as proof that it would be unfair to offer race-based remedies to those left behind. Even many minorities have embraced themes of self-help and personal responsibility.

Others, like the Duke professor Darity, say that America “has never come to terms with racial economic inequality.”

“The current situation,” Darity said, “is reinforcing and widening those inequalities.”

Popularity: 81% [?]