EWOT #4

Today I came past an interesting article talking about how many hispanics in America are listing themselves as white. A huge part of economics and making decisions is identifying possible negative consequences of decisions. By hispanics lying about their race, I see much more negative future effects on the hispanic community than good ones. One of the future negative consequences of this is that high populated hispanic areas will not have hispanic culture surrounding them. When people go to set up a business, they scope out many potential areas to build their business at. A big factor in this is the demographics of that area as well as age and ethnicity ratios. If a lot of hispanics in a certain town list themselves as white, hispanic businesses will not open up in their town because they will think that there is a low hispanic population around there. This hurts both the business owner and people of the town. It hurts the business owner because he misses out on a great place to set up his business where it will thrive. Him opening in a different location might cause his business to fail and put him and the people who worked for him into unemployment. It hurts the people of the town because they will miss out on a future job opportunity by working for this business owner as well as missing out on the services that the business owner would have provided to them.

Another unintended consequence is that many colleges and organizations have quotas of what ratio of different ethnicities that they need to have in their organization, school, or institution. If these hispanics list that they are white, they are more likely to get turned away because there are going to be a higher amount of whites that apply than hispanics making the chances of becoming accepted harder. I have a friend from home who is African American and applied to Cornell. He was a good high school student, but based on his test scores and grades, he was not qualified enough to be accepted into Cornell based on their average acceptance test scores and grades. Because his test scores and grades were high compared to other African Americans and they had to meet their quota of African Americans in the school, he was accepted into the school and is currently enrolled there. This kind of fortune will not happen to these hispanics if the continue to list themselves as white.

http://news.yahoo.com/census-hispanics-fuel-us-white-population-growth-173449405.html