LOOK CLOSELY at how Massachusetts is growing, and a pattern emerges. It’s visible in the families opening small businesses in places like Lawrence and Springfield, in the surge of young workers entering fields like health care, construction, and climate tech, and in the numbers: Nearly 80 percent of the state’s population growth over the last decade came from Hispanic/Latino residents, along with more than $30 billion in added economic output. That’s not a projection. That’s what’s already happened.
We Are ALX and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation recently partnered on “¡Vamos Massachusetts!”, a new report that shows how pivotal Hispanic/Latino residents already are to the state’s economy and outlines what’s needed to match that contribution with opportunity.
Hispanics/Latinos now represent more than one in eight workers in Massachusetts, and in the last decade their share of the population has grown nearly twice as fast as the national Hispanic/Latino population. Yet persistent gaps in education, workforce access, and wealth threaten to limit both Hispanic/Latino progress and the Commonwealth’s economic resilience…