President Bush will give his last State of the Union address tonight in Congress. How have Latinos fared under his administration? The facts speak for themselves:
Housing
$213 billion: The amount the subprime mortgage crisis will cost black and Hispanic homeowners for loans taken out during the past eight years. It is projected that Hispanics will forfeit $75.8 billion to $128.9 billion.
110,674: The projected number of foreclosures on 2005 subprime loans for Latinos. Latinos make up 14.8 percent of the population, but represent about 21 percent of the subprime default burden.
Immigration
4,077: The number of workers arrested on work site raids and deported in 2007. The majority of them were Hispanic.
500: The number of children who were separated from their parents, left uncared for, and who faced economic instability as a result of the immigration raids conducted in Colorado, Nebraska, and Massachusetts in 2007. Most of these children are U.S. citizens.
8.6 million: The number of workers nationwide who would have been affected by the administration’s efforts to send Social Security No-Match letters—letters that would have forced many employers to fire workers because their social security numbers do not match SSA records. Seventy percent of the errors in the database refer to U.S. citizen workers.
1.4 million: The number of legal permanent residents who are now facing an 18-month delay in their citizenship applications due to administrative backlogs.
Education
1.5 million: The number of Latinos between the ages of 16 and 24 year olds who were dropouts in 2004, more than double the dropout rate for blacks (12 percent), and more than three times the rate for whites.
Health Care
15.3 million: The number of uninsured Hispanics in 2006. This represents 34.1 percent of the Hispanic population versus only 10.8 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 20.5 percent of Blacks.
3.4 Million: The estimated number of Latino children under the age of 18 who lacked health care coverage in 2006.
11.1 percent: Percentage of Hispanic children under 18 years of age who did not have a usual source of health care in 2004-2005 compared with only 5.1 percent of white children and 6.1 percent of black children.
Poverty
9.2 million: The number of Hispanics living in poverty in 2006. This number represents 20.6 percent of the Latino population—far higher than the rate for whites (8.2 percent).
Unemployment
6.3 percent: The unemployment rate among Latinos as of December 2007—the highest unemployment rate for Latinos in more than two years.
Latin America
81 percent: Percentage of leaders from six countries in Latin American who gave President Bush a negative overall job approval rating in a poll conducted in 2005. The poll, conducted by the Miami Herald/University of Miami/Zogby, interviewed 523 people in the public and private sectors, mass media, and academia from six countries in Latin America.
4.6: The rank out of 10 given to President George W. Bush by respondents in 18 countries. The ranking puts President Bush in the same spot as Hugo Chavez and just ahead of Fidel Castro. The poll was conducted by Latinobarómetro which interviewed at least 1,000 people in each of the countries polled (20,234 in all) in 2006.