If you’re a Latino voter in Pennsylvania, you might be feeling like la reina o el rey de la fiesta right about now. Millions of dollars are being spent on Spanish-language radio ads. Candidates are making appearances on Univision. And pollsters are trying to figure out what issues you care about.
There are an estimated 579,000 eligible Latino voters statewide — enough to tip the election for the entire country.
Last week, the Hispanic Federation and Latino Victory Foundation released results from a poll showing that 56 percent of Latino voters in PA consider cost of living and inflation a top issue in the U.S. Forty-two percent said jobs and the economy are a top issue.
Those issues ranked higher than housing costs, abortion, gun violence and the U.S.-Mexico border.
No matter who gets elected to the White House, the president only has limited control over the economy, and their policy proposals will have to get through Congress as well. Still, here’s how the presidential candidates’ top economic proposals might affect Latinos in the coming years.
How would Latinos fare under Trump’s economic plan?
Like many small business owners, David Cosme has felt the pinch of inflation over the past couple of years. The 67-year-old runs Cosme’s Dollar Plus in Philadelphia’s Bloque de Oro, which has been home to Puerto Ricans and Latin American immigrants for decades.
Despite voting for Biden in the last election, Cosme says he’s leaning toward former President Donald Trump this time around. “He’s a businessman,” says Cosme, wearing a black baseball cap and t-shirt with the words “Born to strive” in orange across his chest. “He knows how to make it work.”
Here are some of the things that Trump has said he would do:
Make it more expensive for foreign countries to import goods to the U.S.
Trump’s plan to increase import taxes — known as tariffs — would make a range of goods more expensive. That, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation, “would raise taxes on U.S. imports, burdening consumers and unprotected industries with higher taxes and lower incomes and redistributing some of those losses to protected firms.”
Inflation on food, household items, and many other products has already hurt Latinos more than other Americans. Cosme, the business owner in North Philadelphia, said that he has had to keep raising the price of items in his store. But he doesn’t think that his customers, many of them searching for bargains, will be able to afford to shop there if prices keep going up.
But higher prices on goods — and especially the essentials — would be the consequences of increasing tariffs on imports, according to many economists. The American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank, said Trump’s tariffs would increase household costs between an estimated $1,700 and $2,350 annually. All of this points toward negative impacts on Latino families, who spend a greater share of their income on basic goods like food and housing in comparison with White non-Hispanics.
Expand existing tax cuts and eliminate taxes on tips
Trump has championed a range of tax cuts and changes to tax policy, including eliminating taxes on tips. These also include signature tax changes that he made during his first administration, eliminating subsidies for renewable energy purchases, exempting Social Security benefits from being taxed, and a host of other changes.
One of the most popular proposals from Trump (and recently adopted by his opponent) is the idea of eliminating taxes on workers’ tips. This could be helpful for Latino families. About 24.9 percent of workers in the food preparation and serving-related industries are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Belinda Román, an economist and professor at St. Mary’s University in Texas, found a lot to like about the idea of eliminating taxes on tips for Latino workers, who are overrepresented in the service sector. “The waiters, the waitresses, they get so very little for what they do,” she says, but by removing some of the taxes on what they earn, it will help young people or women coming back into the workforce “that are trying to feed kids, trying to keep going.”
“So that’s a good thing to help that level of our economy,” she says.
Unfortunately, economists say that the effects of the policy could have unintended consequences. Among the problems: It could lead to a cut in base salaries, people could start tipping less, and even the actual financial break would be minimal because taxes on tips are so low anyway.
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation, which analyzed the impact on the economy of Trump’s proposed tax cuts and tariffs, determined that even when taking into account the elimination of tips, lower- and middle-income households in the U.S. would fare worse than the wealthiest Americans. “In general, Trump has proposed tax cuts that provide a larger relative benefit to higher-income taxpayers, while his major proposed offset of higher import tariffs falls harder on lower- and middle-income taxpayers,” according to the analysis.
Send millions of non-citizens back to their countries.
Though it is not strictly an economic proposal, Trump’s plan to send millions of undocumented immigrants back to their countries of origin would have a severe effect on employment and the gross domestic product (GDP).
According to a Pew study, 75 percent of U.S. Hispanics consider migrants entering the U.S. through Mexico to be a crisis, and 74 percent think the government has handled the situation poorly. But economically, Trump’s plan could backfire. “Large-scale deportation efforts would be very disruptive in some industries and would hamstring the current growth in employment, which has been driven in large part by increased immigration,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institute.
A different study found that undocumented immigrants contribute $1 trillion to the country’s bottom line. The American Immigration Council, which supports migration, released a report in October estimating that if 11 million people were deported at one time from the U.S., it would cost the country $315 billion. It would also shrink the economy by billions of dollars and cause labor shocks across multiple industries, especially in the construction and agricultural sectors where Latino workers often find jobs.
Sara Avila, an economics professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and member of the American Society of Hispanic Economists, pointed to other effects.
“Unauthorized immigrants are not just workers. They are consumers too,” she says. “Some of them even contribute to Social Security without any benefits. They pay taxes without any benefits. So you lose the consumption, the contribution to taxes, the contribution to social security and deporting them means less demand for groceries, for housing, for services and all other needs.”
The effects would also ripple throughout Latino communities. Many live and work with people who may be in this country without documents. They could be family members and friends, helping to contribute their earnings to the household.
How would Latinos fare under Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plan?
Victor Tejada, the 39-year-old founder and CEO of Delivery Guys, an app-based business, called Trump’s proposals “dangerous for the nation and possibly for the world.” Because of that, he said he is voting for Harris and welcomed her plans to largely continue Biden’s economic policies.
“The economy is at full performance. Everyone is working,” Tejada, who traces his roots to the Dominican Republic, said in Spanish. “That’s magical because that gives the worker a lot of strength … They can compete in a better way, and I think that labor is the number one pillar of the economy.”
Here are highlights of what Harris has said she would do:
Increase taxes on the wealthy and credits for families with children
Under the Harris plan, the corporate income tax would increase as would the rate for individuals making over $400,000. Other tax policies “remain unspecified,” according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, which found that the Harris proposals would “raise top tax rates on corporate and individual income to among the highest in the developed world, slowing economic growth and reducing competitiveness.”
Avila says it’s standard economic theory that increasing taxes on the wealthy leads to a reduction in wages. But she says new research demonstrates that whether wages are affected by tax increases depends on the conditions of the labor market.
Harris also proposes to expand tax credits for families, including with an expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). Expanding the CTC is not only popular politically, but also has been shown to reduce poverty and grow the middle class. Under Harris’ proposal, the CTC would provide up to $3,600 per child for the middle class. She has also proposed tax relief up to $6,000 for newborns in their first year of life.
Expanding the CTC would have positive benefits for Latino families, which have the largest average number of people per household; Hispanic birth rates accounted for nearly 25 percent of total in the U.S. in 2022. For parents struggling with high costs of groceries, child care, and other expenses, the credit would help offset some of the economic turbulence of the past few years.
Various economists have supported expanding the CTC in one way or the other, and it is popular among voters, which may be why Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has proposed a similar expansion of up to $5,000 per family. (Vance’s proposal is not officially included in Trump’s plans).
UnidosUs, a Latino advocacy program, has championed CTC expansion. More than 33 percent (one in three) Latino children would benefit from a proposed bipartisan expansion of CTC to up to $3,400 per child, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“We now know that policy makers can dramatically reduce child poverty with the political will to do so, and that the rising cost of living is the most important issue for Latino voters,” Laura MacCleery, Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy, at UnidosUS, said about to the bipartisan bill.
Go after companies that are making groceries too expensive.
Harris has also championed the idea of passing a law to fight grocery price gouging. As a proposal, lowering grocery costs could help Latino households, since they disproportionately experience food insecurity — where there is limited or insufficient availability of nutritional and safe foods. According to researchers, high grocery prices may be one of the key reasons for this.
But it is unclear whether controlling prices through government policy would have any substantive impact on food prices, since a complex combination of factors are to blame. For example, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that the tight labor market contributes significantly to higher food costs. “Tight labor markets and wage increases have put upward pressure on the costs of labor, production, and distribution, which have been passed on to consumers,” the report’s authors concluded.
Some economists have described the proposal as political theater. “Such a law might be popular, but it would have, at best, no impact on grocery prices and might even make the problem worse,” the Cato Institute argued.
Harris would largely maintain economic policies put into place by Biden
Perhaps the biggest risk Harris is taking is to largely continue Biden’s economic policies. Earlier this year, one survey found that 58 percent of Americans believed that the economy was getting worse because the Biden administration had mismanaged it. That is also a talking point from the Trump campaign. But as economist Francisco Rivera-Batiz underscores in a recent op-ed, it’s wrong to blame inflation on Biden. He called it a global phenomenon caused by the war in Ukraine, soaring energy costs, the breakdown of supply chains, and monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve.
And how have Latinos done under Biden? According to the U.S Department of Treasury, the Biden-Harris administration’s economic policies have led to the creation of 5 million jobs for Latinos and increased wages by 4 percent.
Digging deeper, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the unemployment rate among Latinos was largely the same under the previous Trump and Biden administrations. However, inflation-adjusted wages have been higher for Latinos under Biden than Trump, according to an analysis by Politifact.
Rivera-Batiz, who has been a consultant for the World Bank, says that any evaluation of how Latinos have done under Biden needs to first start with the understanding that his administration began in the midst of the pandemic with the economy frozen. He says when Biden came into office, the unemployment rate among Latinos was 8.5 percent. Now it is at 5 percent.
“There are more Latinos either looking for a job or working, and that’s a good sign,” he says. Wages have also gone up over the past four years for Latinos by about 4 percent. That is higher than the U.S. total, which grew at 2.4 percent. According to those data points, he says, “Latinos are doing better than the overall population.”
Román cautions that presidents only have so much control over the economy. “I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying, Trump did this, Biden did that, and that’s the story,” she says. “They just happen to be the figureheads at the time.”
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