Analysis of the Determinants of Homeownership Among Immigrant Agriculture Workers

Homeownership has long been considered an indicator of status and wealth. This has led many presidential administrations to focus on increasing homeownership. These efforts have resulted in some of the highest homeownership rates in U.S. history, however, this does not tell the whole story. While the total U.S. homeownership rate is consistently above 62%, for the Hispanic population that number is still below 50%, and for smaller subsets of the Hispanic population that number is considerably smaller. In our analysis we focus on the subset of the Hispanic population which are agricultural workers. We use the National Agricultural Worker Survey to find individual level data for a sample of Hispanic agricultural workers. In past work I have analyzed which individual characteristics impact homeownership in this population. The goal of this analysis is to expand that research to include macro-economic variables and to analyze the changes in housing, and immigration policy which could have impacts on the likelihood of an individual to own a home. We create a logistic regression model to determine which variables have the greatest significance and then we analyze the results to determine possible immigration and housing policy implications