The stats are in. Latinos are worried about their livelihoods under the present economy. Since COVID-19 shut down the economy in March, Latinos are facing an uncertain future. 

Take, for example, Vanessa Quiles, a 21-year-old recent graduate who was planning on entering the architecture field after graduating from Otis College of Art and Design.

Now, she’s not sure what she’s going to do. “Many places have stopped hiring, either taken down job applications that were posted or I’ve heard that a lot of people are getting laid off from smaller firms that may not have a lot of projects coming in,” she told NBC News. “I’m trying to remain hopeful.”

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Photo: David L. Ryan via Getty Images

The evidence backs this up. On September 4th, the August Jobs Report showed that the unemployment rate is at 8.4. Additionally, 28 million people have filed for unemployment. What were once considered temporary furloughs have now morphed into permanent layoffs.

And Latinos are being hit harder by the economic uncertainty of the pandemic more than any other ethnic group. 

According to The Pew Research Center, 59% percent of Latinos claim that they live in households that have experienced job losses directly related COVID-19. Compared those numbers to 43% of the non-Hispanic population. 

But these grim statistics represent more than just faceless numbers–they are people fighting to get by everyday, scraping by on unemployment checks and dwindled savings. And they feel that the Trump administration has let them down.

Like Denver resident Isabella Prado, who is frustrated by the Trump administration’s lack of foresight when it came to financially taking care of Americans during the pandemic. 

“There’s no help,” the 25-year-old Latina told Mitú. “I saw other countries’ stimulus packages were, first of all, monthly, not like, ‘Here’s a thousand dollars, make it last you for four months.’ Even if it wasn’t enough to obviously pay bills [in America], at least you’d have some sort of monthly income. Like, we don’t even have that.”

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 economic shutdown in March, Trump has come under fire for the disorganized way he has dealt with the economic fallout that the pandemic has wreaked on millions of Americans. “It’s the same way [Trump] is dealing with global warming,” continued Prado. “He’s acting like it’s not there. He’s in denial about it.”

Joe Biden, however, recently outlined a plan to re-open the economy, a plan which includes expediting aid to small businesses, enforcing strict oversight on big corporations, providing direct cash relief to struggling families, and funding the infrastructure to provide wide-ranging COVID-19 testing capabilities so the economy can be prepared to open up again. 

This isn’t the first time that Biden has shown his leadership on the economic front.

He notably spearheaded the Recovery Act of 2009 that was responsible for creating 2 million jobs and successfully stimulated the economy out of the Great Recession.

Biden’s aids were effusive in their praise of his handling of the Recovery Act. “He held meetings with the Cabinet as a whole, the various agencies that are part of this, every other week to try to make sure we were moving quickly,” said his former Chief-of-Staff, Ron Klain. 

In other words, Joe Biden has a proven track record of taking care of the economy. And with pandemic hitting the wallets of Latinos especially hard, we need economic recovery more than ever. 

According to a poll conducted by the LA Times, only 42% of Latinos in California reported having the option to work from home, meaning they are essential workers and on the front lines of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. That is compared with 61% of white Californians who are able to work from home. And Latinos, like Prado, feel like they are being taken for granted.

“There’s a lot of minorities that are on the front lines in the hospitals, that are cleaning up after all the sick people,” Prado told Mitú. “They are putting themselves at risk just as much as nurses are. They don’t even get a shout-out, they don’t get anything.” 

That’s why it is our responsibility to vote in the upcoming election. The time to create a voting plan–whether it’s early voting, mail-in voting, or in-person voting the day-of–is now. The future of our country is on the ballot. And, we cannot let nuestras familias down. Go to IWillVote.com or VoyaVotar.com and text TODOS to 30330 today to learn what choices you have to vote in your community and get information on where and when to vote.