Washington Post, September 13, 2016

Last year marked the greatest improvement in the typical American family’s finances on record, according to a new annual report from the Census Bureau, especially for the working poor.

Hispanics and immigrants in particular benefited from last year’s economy. Median incomes for Hispanics increased 6.1 percent. Immigrants’ incomes, excluding naturalized citizens skyrocketed 10.5 percent.

Those improvements contributed to an overall increase of 6.4 percent in the Western states, said Giovanni Peri, an economist who studies immigration at the University of California at Davis.

The connection between immigrants’ incomes and the labor market “is an important sign of how much they are really contributing to the economy,” Peri said. “They are almost all working families, almost all working in jobs for which there is demand.”