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America Becoming a Hispanic Nation USA (By Phil Brennan, NewsMax) March 15, 2004 - With dizzying speed Hispanics have become America largest minority, having overwhelmed African-Americans last year to take the lead in that category.
They are also reshaping America and changing the nations political equation as FDRs landslide election in 1932 altered politics for more than a half century.
Flocking to the U.S. from south of the border, mainly from Mexico, there are today 39 million Hispanics, including some 8 million undocumented immigrants here.
Bilingual, bicultural, mostly younger, Hispanics will, Business Week reports "drive growth in the U.S. population and workforce as far out as statisticians can project."
With their high birth rates, they are creating a huge army of kindergarten to thirtyish Hispanics thanks to their astounding population growth -- 3 percent a year, vs. 0.8 percent for everyone else.
Their numbers, Business Week says in a recent cover story entitled Hispanic Nation, are so huge that, like the postwar baby boomers before them, the Hispanic Generation is becoming a driving force in the economy, politics, and culture of the U.S.
Half of all new workers in the U.S. in the past decade were Hispanic, and they are expected to go from being 12 percent of today's work force to nearly 25 percent within the next two generations, Business Week estimated.
Buying Power
Despite low $33,0000-a-year family incomes, well below the national $42,000 average, Hispanics' expanding buying power is still having a huge influence on the food Americans eat, the clothes we buy, and the cars we drive.
In response, companies are busy altering their products and marketing strategies to capture this new and rapidly increasing group of consumers.
Procter & Gamble Co. spent $90 million on advertising directed at Hispanics for 12 products such as Crest and Tide -- 10 percent of its ad budget for those brands and a 28 percent hike in just a year. The company has a 65-person bilingual team to target Hispanics and P&G tailors everything from detergent to toothpaste to Hispanic tastes. "Hispanics are a cornerstone of our growth in North America," Graciela Eleta, vice-president of P&G's multicultural team in Puerto Rico told Business Week.
In 2002, Cypress, California-based PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. hired Russell A. Bennett, a longtime Mexico City resident, to help target Hispanics. When he found that they were already 20 percent of the company's 3 million policyholders his new unit, Hispanic Health Solutions, began marketing health insurance in Spanish, referring Hispanics to Spanish-speaking doctors, and translating documents into Spanish for Hispanic workers.
"We knew we had to remake the entire company, linguistically and culturally, to deal with this market," Bennett told Business Week.
After local Hispanic merchants took much of their business in a Houston neighborhood that became 85 percent Hispanic, last year Kroger Co. (KR ), the nation's No.1 grocery chain, spent $1.8 million to convert the 59,000-sq.-ft. store into an all-Hispanic super mercado. Across the country, Kroger has expanded its private-label Buena Comida line from the standard rice and beans to 105 different items.
Hispanic political power has reached the point where the major parties are scrambling to court the Hispanic vote. Crucial Swing Vote With the 2004 presidential race now seen as a probable squeaker, political observers see Hispanics as the crucial swing vote. According to a new study by HispanTelligence, a Santa Barbara, Calif. research group, the increase in the numbers of voting-age Hispanics since 2000 is now greater than the margin of victory in seven states for either President George W. Bush or former Vice-President Albert Gore. It was thus no accident that Bush opened the election year with a guest-worker proposal for immigrants that observers pegged as an undisguised play for the Hispanic vote. As a follow up, Bush met with Mexican President Vicente Fox, at the President's Crawford, Texas, ranch on March 5 in a move to patch up his strained relationship with Fox. Democrats, long the dominant party among Hispanics, are also making their pitch for the Hispanic vote. For example, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a Mexican-American delivered the Democrat's a first-ever Spanish-language response to the State of the Union address. Spur to the Economy The Hispanic boom, Business Week observes is a welcome spur to the economy at a time when others' population growth has slowed to a crawl. Says former Housing and Urban Development chief Henry Cisneros, without a steady supply of new workers and consumers, a graying U.S. might see a long-term slowdown along the lines of aging Japan. Cisneros, who now builds homes in Hispanic-rich markets such as San Antonio told Business Week "Here we have this younger, hard-working Hispanic population whose best working years are still ahead," he says. According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia Hispanics are a key catalyst of economic growth, with a disposable income that has jumped 29 percent since 2001, to $652 billion last year, double the pace of the rest of the population. And the Internal Revenue Service calculates that the ranks of Hispanic entrepreneurs has jumped by 30 percent since 1998. "The impact of Hispanics is huge, especially since they're the fastest-growing demographic," Merrill Lynch & Co. Vice-President Carlos Vaquero, himself a Mexican immigrant based in Houston told Business Week. Vaquero oversees part of the company's 350-person Hispanic unit, which is hiring 100 mostly bilingual financial advisers this year and which generated $1 billion worth of new business nationwide last year, double its goal. But with the benefits come problems, such as the increasing possibility that the U.S. is about to become a bi-lingual nation. Language Gap Already, Hispanics are pushing U.S. institutions to accommodate a second linguistic group. The Labor Dept. and Social Security Administration, for example are hiring more Spanish-language administrators to cope with the surge in Spanish speakers in the workforce. And more and more politicians, are reaching out to Hispanics in their own language. It is even being suggested that the spread of Spanish could eventually cause Congress to recognize it as an official second language, much as French is in Canada today. "America has to learn to live with diversity -- the change in population, in [Spanish-language] media, in immigration," Andrew Erlich, the founder of Erlich Transcultural Consultants Inc. in North Hollywood, California told Business Week. Unlike previous waves of immigrants who flocked to the U.S. in the 19th century, many Hispanics have resisted the effects of the traditional melting pot, instead clinging to their native traditions and customs as well as adjusting to the local culture. Observers see this as a continuing phenomenon. What Business Week calls "The Hispanicizing of America" has created hot spots in the political landscape. "Over the years, periodic backlashes have erupted in areas with fast-growing Hispanic populations, notably former California Governor Pete Wilson's 1994 effort, known as Proposition 187, to ban social services to undocumented immigrants," Business Week recalled. "English-only laws, which limit or prohibit schools and government agencies from using Spanish, have passed in some 18 states. Most of these efforts have been ineffective, but they're likely to continue as the Hispanic presence increases. "For more than 200 years, the nation has succeeded in weaving the foreign-born into the fabric of U.S. society, incorporating strands of new cultures along the way. With their huge numbers, Hispanics are adding all kinds of new influences. Cinco de Mayo has joined St. Patrick's Day as a public celebration in some neighborhoods, and burritos are everyday fare. More and more, Americans hablan Espaρol. Will Hispanics be absorbed just as other waves of immigrants were? It's possible, but more likely they will continue to straddle two worlds, figuring out ways to remain Hispanic even as they become Americans," Business Week concludes. |
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