Released: September 28, 2011

Latino Children in Poverty

by D’Vera Cohn

For the first time, Latinos are the single largest group of poor children, outnumbering whites, according to census data analyzed in a new Pew Hispanic Center report on Hispanic childhood poverty. In 2010, 37.3% of poor children were Latino, 30.5% were white and 26.6% were black. Most of the 6.1 million poor Hispanic children have parents who are immigrants. Among the Latino groups with the highest poverty rates are children of single mothers (57.3% poor), children of parents with a high school education or less (48.3%) and children of unemployed parents (43.5%).