Today on The View, Kelly Osbourne overshadowed Donald Trump’s comments about Latinos by offering up this line: ”If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilets, Donald Trump?”
Needless to say, the more than 24 million Latinos in the workforce do much more than clean toilets (not that there’s anything wrong with having that task as part of your job). Here are some numbers for Osbourne, who subsequently apologized on Facebook:
In 2012, Hispanics had the second highest labor-force-participation rate, at 66.4%, beating whites (64%), Asians (63.9%), and the population as a whole (63.7%), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders had the highest rate at 71.4%.)
In 2013, more than 6.8 million Latinos worked in private US companies with 100 or more employees, including more than 577,000 professionals, 276,000 technicians, and 740,000 sales workers, according to data from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Between 1980 and 2013, the percentage of Latinos in the US with a Bachelor’s degree nearly doubled, from 7.7% to 14.0%, according to Pew Research Center.
There are more than 50,000 licensed Hispanic physicians in the US. And in 2012, the Association of American Medical Colleges reported applications from Hispanics for medical school rose by 7% and the number of enrollees went up by 6% since 2011.
In 2009, there were nearly 25,000 Hispanic firefighters, 72,000 chefs and head cooks, 30,000 lawyers, 14,000 musicians and singers, and 5,000 aircraft pilots and flight engineers, according to the US Census.
None of these numbers, though, should obscure the fact that Latinos are usually at a disadvantage in the workplace. They often, for example, work in the most dangerous jobs: In the US, Hispanics are the only ethnic group whose number of fatal work injuries went up in 2013, according to the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are also the least likely to get paid leave and other flexibility in the workplace.