The Economic Development Task Force of the NHCSL, charged with working to develop strategies for the betterment of the entire Latino population in the US, issued a statement to encourage every Latino/Hispanic household to be counted in the 2010 Census. The Task Force reaffirmed that it is highly critical for the Hispanic community to be actively involved in the Census 2010. The Census will benefit the entire Hispanic community, and the NHCSL will work diligently to ensure that everyone is counted.

To this end, the NHCSL gives complete supports to the Census 2010 Complete Count Committees in communities across the country. Complete Count Committees are volunteer teams consisting of community leaders, faith-based groups, schools, businesses, media outlets and others who are appointed by elected officials and/or community leaders to work together to make sure entire communities are counted. Ultimately, it is up to all of us, and together we can make sure every Hispanic/Latino person in the nation is counted. For more information please visit www.census.gov.

Last month, the NHCSL Spring meeting was a huge success for our members and our partners. With more than 30 legislators in attendance, the members were greeted by the top White House officials for a briefing that has started the process of greater inclusion and collaboration with the Obama administration for the NHCSL. We also had a brief visit with several members of Congress, kicking off what will be an annual “Day on the Hill” for NHCSL. Our leadership had the opportunity to meet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Congressman Ben Lujan, and Congressman John Conyers. In addition to these meetings, the NHCSL conducted is executive committee meeting along with the BBA members and addressed some critical business issues including our task force committee work, our fundraising efforts, and our policy agenda for 2009. We look forward to our next executive meeting and BBA meeting slated to take place in July in Philadelphia – stay tuned for updates at www.nhcsl.org.

The first meeting of the BBA for 2009 took place at the recent Spring meeting in Washington, DC. Chaired by Emilio Gonzalez, the BBA is eager to engage more closely with the NHCSL Task Forces and have aligned their own working groups to be more in line with the efforts of the legislative members. As a group, the BBA commends the NHCSL for hosting an open, working meeting of the Task Forces during the most recent meeting. I and a few other BBA members attended this meeting, and we found it very informative and very interactive. These kinds of dialogues are the reason why we are all involved, and we look forward to more of these opportunities in the future. The BBA is also eager to work with staff to ensure that there will be regularly scheduled teleconferences of the BBA to stay in touch with the NHCSL’s priorities and find ways that our partnership can grow the reach of the organization and its legislative members. We welcome the input of the legislative members at our teleconferences and hope to be able to report that our efforts are assisting in new corporate member recruitment as well as assisting in the formulation of new initiatives in line with the NHCSL public policy priorities.

The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a report that finds that Hispanics now make up more than one-in-five of all children in the United States - up from 9% in 1980 -- and as their numbers have grown, their demographic profile has changed as well. More than half of the nation's 16 million Hispanic children are now second generation," meaning they are the U.S. born sons or daughters of at least one foreign-born parent, typically someone who came to this country in the immigration wave from Mexico, Central America and South America that began around 1980. In 1980, a majority of Latino children were third or higher generation -- the U.S. born sons or daughters of U.S. born parents.
What does this mean? First and second generation Latino children are Less likely than third or higher generation children to be fluent in English and to have parents who completed high school. They are more likely to live in poverty. But they are less likely than third or higher generation Latino children to live in single parent households. Another characteristic that separates Latino children along generational lines is their legal status. It is estimated that fewer than one-in-ten of all Hispanic children are unauthorized immigrants. However, about one quarter have one or more parents who is an unauthorized immigrant. For more details, please visit www.pewhispanic.org.