Poverty

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, health and wealth, financial services, and unemployment.

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) hosted an event today to release “Latino Financial Access and Inclusion," a new report that examines the relationship between comprehensive immigration reform and household financial stability for U.S. Latinos. At the event, experts from NCLR, Citi, the American Bankers Association, and a Chicago-based organization, The Resurrection Project, explored the report's findings on financial inclusion within the Latino immigrant community. The report analyzes data from a survey of roughly 1,000 low-income Latino-identified individuals across California during 2012.

Janet Murguía, President of NCLR, began the event by discussing the historical exclusion Latino immigrants have faced in the mainstream financial services marketplace. Despite myriad barriers to accessing financial services and some significant economic challenges, this report found that Latino consumers were actively prioritizing saving, utilizing a range of financial products to meet their needs, and displaying savvy engagement with financial service providers.

The report also builds the case for comprehensive immigration reform and ensuring a path to citizenship by demonstrating the variance in financial stability and engagement by citizenship status. For example, among immigrants who had been in the U.S. the same amount of time, naturalized citizens were more likely to be engaged in the mainstream financial services sector than their non-citizen counterparts. As Murguía put it, U.S. citizenship opens the doors to not only better job opportunities and education, but also greater financial inclusion. When combined, these resources create a path to upward economic and social mobility. Thus, the report explicitly frames citizenship status as an asset and calls for the current immigration reform conversation to better reflect the economic needs and opportunities of the Latino immigrant community.

"An Assets Agenda for the States" examines current state asset building efforts with an eye toward examining those policies and priorities that are emerging as trends in this challenging economic environment. This appendix serves as a resource accompanying the paper, which can be viewed here.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the economy, inequality, government assistance, and financial services.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include public benefits, poverty, housing, and unemployment.

As any parent will tell you, mobility is a game-changer. Once junior can crawl, gone are the days of leaving him on his playmat while you step away, however briefly, and expect him to be in the same spot playing with the safe and developmentally appropriate toys you left him with. No, he'd rather be exploring the shoes you left in the corner of room with his mouth or in pursuit of the family cat. What worked before has to be reexamined to be successful once mobility enters the picture. 

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on New America's Early Education Initiative blog. Conor Williams recently joined the Early Education Initiative as a Senior Researcher. He's just completed a PhD in Government at Georgetown University, a degree he pursued after teaching first grade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Conor's research addresses the challenges immigrant families face in the American education system, educational equity as a means to increased social mobility, and the history of education in the United States.

In an era of Washington gridlock, there’s almost nothing quite as gratifying as seeing big policy changes that echo one’s recent arguments. Along those lines, Thursday was a great day for advocates of more and higher-quality child care in the United States. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new Obama administration proposal to raise the federal baseline for subsidized child care centers across the country. 

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, retirement, the workforce, and financial services.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on New America's In The Tank blog.

The average childcare worker in the U.S. earns less than a janitor. Sure, some daycare centers pay well, but the average parent can’t afford those high-end centers that can cost as much as public university tuition.

Piling on to that: The daycare industry is largely unregulated with low standards on quality of care. At an event this week based off of a recent New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, panelists showed how that painful reality -- a broken system full of tales of toddler deaths and injuries – can also have dire consequences for our economy.

Update 5/22/13: The original version of this post incorrectly used the term "credit score" in several places where "credit check" or "credit history" would have been more appropriate and accurate. The post has been edited to reflect that correction. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a piece that explains the process by which the credit reporting agencies deal with employee screening. Specifically, employers may request prospective employees' credit histories via a credit check, but these histories do not contain an actual credit score. Thank you to Greg Fisher at creditscoring.com for pointing out the error.

The use of credit checks to inform hiring decisions has been getting some much deserved scrutiny recently. Over the weekend, Charles Ellison for the Philadelphia Tribune and Gary Rivlin for the New York Times took a look at the practice of employers evaluating a job applicant's credit as part of the employment decision-making process. Ellison chronicles recent legislative efforts to curb the practice and points out that campaign finance data shows lawmakers are receiving sums of money from major credit reporting companies. Rivlin spoke with non-profit service providers and unemployed individuals who have experienced the negative effects of this phenomenon first hand.

On the surface, using credit checks as part of employment screening may seem like a simple, data-driven way for employers to ascertain a candidate's reliability. Upon closer inspection, however, using credit checks in this way is ineffective and exacerbates inequality.