Why the Federal Government Can’t Recruit and Retain Hispanic-Americans

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by

John Bersentes and Mark Havard

Jan 27, 2010, 5:21 am ET

The U.S. is subject to powerful cultural forces rooted in demographics and ethnicity. Nowhere is the influence of these cultural crosswinds more evident today than in our growing Hispanic population and its increasing claim on a share of the American Dream. By the numbers, Latinos are the dominant minority group in the nation, totaling more than 15 percent of the population, a proportion that continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. They make up just under 13% of the U.S. workforce nationwide, certainly a significant portion but still lagging their overall share in the American population.

But the participation of Hispanic-Americans in the federal workforce is a different story. According to the latest data (2008) from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Latinos make up barely 8% of the Federal workforce. In recent years, a number of high-visibility initiatives have been directed at the challenge of Hispanic participation, but the numbers continue to lag. Despite their seeming best efforts, Federal agencies have generally made little progress in recruiting and retaining Hispanic employees over the last decade.

At TMP Government, this situation has puzzled us as well. In the March Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (ERE’s print publication geared at recruiting leaders), we lay out a seven-step suggested solution to the problem.

For now, though, we’ll kick it off online by suggesting a few possible causes and symptoms of the government’s apparent failure to make headway on this challenge.

Statistics Tell the Tale

Again, Hispanic-Americans are the largest and fastest-growing minority segment in the U.S. By all predictions, this trend will continue at least through the first half of this century. As of its last estimate (2007), the U.S. Census Bureau pegs the median age of U.S. Hispanics at 27.7 years, compared to 36.8 years for the rest of the population. And almost 34% of U.S. Hispanics are younger than 18; for the population as a whole, only 25% of Americans are under 18. By 2050, again according to the Census Bureau, Hispanic-Americans will make up nearly 25% of the total population.

These predictions promise significant implications for our culture and economy — not to mention the U.S. labor market. Overall employment numbers in the U.S. are already showing the impact of this accelerating demographic shift. Since 1980, the American labor force has grown by more than 41%. Fully a third of this increase is accounted for by Hispanics.

Human capital professionals in the corporate world appear to dealing effectively with this groundswell of Hispanics in the general workforce, and are diligently preparing for the new HR imperatives it will bring in its wake. But this is not the case with government human capital leaders. We have one question for them:

Why is the Federal government’s track record of recruiting and developing Hispanic employees so bad?

Across the board, the feds have managed to achieve only 7.8% participation by Hispanics in the government workforce. And the news gets worse: Hispanic men and women today represent only 3.6% of individuals at federal senior pay levels — a proportion that drops to 2.5% when you take political appointees out of the calculation.

These numbers are puzzling, to say the least. The government has traditionally been the standard-bearer for minority participation in the workforce. Consider African-Americans: they make up 13% percent of the U.S. population and — according to the latest available count (2008) — more than 18% of the Federal workforce. Certainly we should credit most of this progress to vigorous initiatives by Federal agencies, beginning in the early 1970s, to recruit and retain talented African-Americans.

But when it comes to leveling the playing field for Hispanics in government, today’s recruitment initiatives appear to be yielding only marginal gains at best, and in some cases they are barely holding the line against attrition.

We’re prepared to suggest several factors that may be diminishing the government’s success in making recruitment gains among Hispanic-Americans. At the same time, we are identifying a number of technical and strategic measures that in our view can go a long way toward helping the government succeed in this mission. Moreover, these innovations have the potential to enrich other dimensions of Federal human capital management substantially — beyond recruitment and beyond the Hispanic-American segment.

What factors influence the government’s disappointing track record in recruiting and retaining Hispanics?

Here, in brief, are a handful of factors that may be contributing to the Feds’ apparent lack of success with the Hispanic-American segment.

Competitive Barriers From Industry

The corporate community has seemingly mastered the Hispanic recruitment challenge. Indeed it may hold the trump card here, both by reason of the resources it can devote to Hispanic engagement programs and the pay premiums it can offer to talented Latino candidates. The government simply can’t keep pace on either score. The Feds aren’t empowered to offer pay incentives based on minority status, and most agencies today don’t have the budgets or staff resources to build comprehensive recruiting/retention programs targeted at the Hispanic segment.

“Geo-Demographic” Barriers

Most federal entry-level positions tend to be in the national capital region. In the District of Columbia and the two adjacent states (Maryland and Virginia), the population of Hispanics is well below that of many other regions, especially in the Southwest and California. The “hire-able” population is simply not that deep in Washington, despite some clustering of Hispanic blue-collar workers in Washington and its near suburbs. Compounding this difficulty is a disconcerting “psychographic” factor suggested anecdotally by many recruiters: young, job-seeking Hispanics in general are less inclined to relocate, because it means leaving their extended families for new positions away from home. In the absence of family ties here, a move to the Washington area for a government job may be inherently less attractive for some Hispanic-Americans.

Lack of High-level Commitment and Resources Among Individual Agencies and Departments

Let’s face it: campaigns to improve Hispanic participation in the Federal workforce simply cannot draw on the same driving momentum in society as the widespread movement for civil rights and equal opportunity for African-Americans. From the 1960s on, in fact, the federal government was the primary institutional driver behind this movement, and a natural leader in the crusade to roll back hiring barriers impeding black Americans.

But when it comes to Hispanics and other underserved minorities, there’s neither the degree of enforced commitment nor even (so far as we can tell) a deeply felt personal commitment at high levels. Without the visible presence of management champions of the cause, there’s little incentive to build real momentum for Hispanic programs within agencies. By the same token, agency funds are rarely available to mount Hispanic programming on the same scale as earlier equal opportunity initiatives centering on African-Americans (except, perhaps, where Spanish language skills are a job requirement).

Misleading Emphasis on Recruiting for Spanish-speaking Positions and Bilingual Skills

Break down the government’s current roster of Hispanic employees and you will find a disconcerting reality: they tend to cluster in public interface positions that call for fluency in Spanish, as well as in low-paying service jobs, like maintenance and food service. In the first instance — although it’s anything but pleasant to contemplate — we’re suggesting that some agencies that need to recruit aggressively for bilingual positions may unconsciously put bilingual qualifications first when they evaluate any Hispanic-American candidate. The result: they may unconsciously filter non-Spanish speaking Hispanics out of consideration for ‘mainstream’ positions that don’t require Spanish-language skills.

We realize that this element is potentially controversial, and are not suggesting that conscious prejudice plays any part in this cycle (if it exists). But we are suggesting that maybe, just maybe, unconscious habits of mind among hiring officials could be channeling Hispanic candidates into the constituent interface track and not considering them carefully enough for mainstream positions if they don’t — or even if they do — fit the bilingual mold.

Scarcity of Agency Resources to Take Comprehensive, Top-down Action

It’s the rare individual agency or department that elevates the full cycle of Hispanic recruitment, retention, and development to a top-level institutional initiative. We have encountered few agencies that have set out to elicit engaged participation from senior leadership, the agency management team, hiring managers, and their operating components, and all units in the agency HR infrastructure. An agency that adopts this kind of vertically integrated organizational strategy would have an advantage ion recruiting all diversity classes, not just Hispanic-Americans.

There’s another flavor of integration that might also help at the agency level: effectively integrating its recruitment outreach thematically by underscoring:

• the full employment life-cycle at the agency, and
• the agency’s commitment to productive inclusion of all diversity classes in the workplace community.

Agencies that approach the Hispanic/diversity recruitment challenge from all of these integrative perspectives, it seems to us, stand a much better chance of success than agencies that revert to standard “checklist” practices of minority hiring.

Lack of Concrete, Government-wide Initiatives for Meeting This Challenge

Up until now, agencies have tended to go it alone rather than teaming with other agencies in the Hispanic recruitment mission. While surely this is due to budgetary constraints (as well as something of a competitive dimension, owing to the perceived scarcity of Hispanic candidates), it’s a less-than-effective way to tackle the challenge. In the typical agency HR infrastructure, recruiting resources are limited and/or distributed across multiple initiatives. The result: Hispanic recruitment and retention (despite the current hue-and-cry) may not attract the urgent managerial, budgetary, and strategic attention they deserve. And while a given agency may have its share of individual champions for the Hispanic cause, it can find itself without the resources and allies to gain real purchase on the initiative.

The alternative is collective effort across agency boundaries. If insularity and inter-agency competitiveness can be set aside and budget barriers cleared, this approach could create empowering economies of scale, not to mention bringing individual, agency-based champions together on the same team, where their collective talent, energy, and enthusiasm can be harnessed and channeled.

Of course, government-wide taskforces to analyze the challenge are a critical (and-all-too familiar) first step, but up to now they haven’t demonstrated the power to implement collective solutions. Luckily, today’s Office of Personnel Management is a leading champion of collective government-wide common action among agencies. OPM is developing similar programs to coordinate recruiting pools of special talent, like technology and finance, for multiple agencies to draw on for new employees. A similar initiative for Hispanic recruiting could go far to address the current challenge.

We realize that many of the influential factors we suggest above will likely stir discussion and controversy. It’s important to regard them as topics for consideration, not hard formulas. We want to inspire more dialogue on this topic, and ultimately spur progress on this very serious challenge. Again, check out the March Journal for our proposed solutions.

Flores drug indictment gives clues to Mexican cartels' networks in the U.S.

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By Steve Fainaru and William Booth
Thursday, December 31, 2009; A06

The Flores brothers had never looked like much in the eyes of local narcotics agents. But by the time it all came crashing down this year, the drug-distribution network allegedly run by the 28-year-old twins from the Mexican American barrios of Chicago was one of the largest and most sophisticated ever seen in the U.S. heartland, according to interviews and federal indictments.

Pedro and Margarito Flores allegedly operated as an American annex to a major Mexican drug mafia, and their arrest and the dismantling of their purported network opened a window on how powerful Mexican cartels operate in the United States, distributing cocaine and heroin with the corporate efficiency of UPS, while back home competitors are tortured and beheaded.

Image by Heart Industry via Flickr

The fortunes of the Flores twins changed because the war on the cartels being waged in Mexico with U.S. help has reshaped the criminal landscape in both countries, generating unprecedented violence but also contributing to the kinds of vicious splits and betrayals that helped in the brothers' arrests, according to narcotics agents and federal indictments.

The sprawling drug operation was essentially a $700 million-a-year distributorship for the Sinaloa cartel, the largest criminal organization in Mexico. It used tractor-trailers to import two tons of cocaine each month for distribution from Chicago warehouses, with cash proceeds shrink-wrapped and shipped back across the border.

The crackdown launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderón has cost more than 16,000 lives and been widely criticized in both countries as ineffective in reining in the drug barons and slowing the flow of drugs into the United States. But the campaign has exposed networks such as the one allegedly run by the Flores brothers, which shipped cocaine from Los Angeles to Chicago and then distributed it to cities across the Midwest, according to interviews and the indictments.

Other than the indictments, few court papers have been filed in the case. The Flores brothers are in U.S. custody; attempts to reach their attorneys were unsuccessful.

Chicago is hardly alone as a home to Mexican cartels; the traffickers operate in 230 U.S. cities, the Justice Department says. But the competition in Chicago might be unusually fierce, with each of the five major Mexican cartels vying for business.

"Much like any legitimate corporation, the drug organizations utilize Chicago as both a distribution and trans-shipment point for their product," Stephen A. Luzinski, acting special agent-in-charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office here, said in an interview. "The extensive accessibility to various modes of transportation, as well as the large and diverse population with an established customer base, makes Chicago an ideal location as a hub."

The family business

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Pedro and Margarito Flores were born into a Mexican immigrant family with strong ties to the narcotics trade. Chicago detectives say their father ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel, as did an older brother. The family melded into the culture in rough neighborhoods such as Little Village and Pilsen, where the Latin Kings and Two-Six gangs fight for turf.

The brothers eventually took over a barbershop and a Mexican restaurant called Mama's Kitchen. They moved to a more expensive neighborhood and drove better cars. But unlike in Mexico, where high-level traffickers are household names, the twins had low profiles.

In Chicago, "you are only as good as your connection," said a former drug dealer who served 10 years in prison and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. And the Flores brothers reportedly had the best connections in town.

Authorities said the brothers worked for two factions of the Sinaloa cartel. One was headed by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the most wanted man in Mexico, recently named by Forbes magazine as the 41st most-powerful person in the world. The other was by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, whose self-appointed nickname -- the Boss of All Bosses -- frequently appeared on messages displayed next to mutilated corpses.

Factional trade, warfare

As described in court documents, the brothers' reach extended deep into Mexico, where Guzmán, Beltrán Leyva and their associates used Boeing 747 jets, private aircraft, submarines, container ships, fishing vessels and speedboats to consolidate enormous shipments of cocaine from Central and South America, including Colombia and Panama.

The Sinaloa cartel in Mexico was tasked with getting the drugs across the border for pickup in a warehouse outside Los Angeles. The Flores brothers allegedly employed dozens of operators to bring the drugs north, including truck drivers who concealed the contraband amid shipments of fruit, vegetables and other consumer goods, and off-loaded cocaine and heroin in the Chicago area at nondescript warehouses, condominiums and brick duplexes managed by their criminal gang. The drugs were split into smaller quantities and "fronted" to customers, who would pay after they sold the contraband on the street.

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But the two Sinaloa factions split last year over the Mexican government's arrest of Beltrán Leyva's brother. The resulting violence consumed several Mexican states and, ultimately, Chicago, as the factions fought over "control of lucrative narcotics trafficking routes into the United States, and the loyalty of wholesale narcotics customers, including the Flores Brothers," according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The brothers were said to be caught in the middle, with both Sinaloa factions threatening violence against them to maintain control over the critical distribution network. Ultimately, U.S. authorities were able to infiltrate the purported Flores crew, setting up sham cocaine sales to make dozens of arrests and to seize more than three metric tons of cocaine.

Pressure on both sides

It is not clear whether the Flores brothers are cooperating with the authorities, but they face life in prison if convicted, and authorities are seeking the forfeiture of more than $1.8 billion. In August, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the district, called the indictments "the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago."

Authorities and people familiar with the drug trade say violence in Mexico and increased enforcement -- symbolized by the Flores case -- are having a dramatic effect on Chicago street sales, at least for now. The wholesale price for a kilo of cocaine -- about 2.2 pounds -- has surged in the past 18 months, from $18,000 to $29,000 and often more, according to authorities.

U.S. officials declined to discuss specifics of the case or whether information from the investigation helped lead Mexican authorities to Beltrán Leyva, who was killed this month during a two-hour gun and grenade battle with Mexican forces in the city of Cuernavaca.

But Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the DEA, said in an interview that pressure on both sides of the border has forced the cartels to rely increasingly on inexperienced operators such as the Flores twins.

"There have always been gatekeepers -- people who use their familial relationships to facilitate the movement of drugs across the border," Placido said. "Those people used to be gods, and they would control an area for years. Now they often last months before they are arrested or assassinated.

"What that creates is opportunities for a 28-year-old who . . . isn't worried about dying," he said.

Staff writer Kari Lydersen and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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Soccer spoken here - Philadelphia Inquirer

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By Michael Matza

Inquirer Staff Writer

On a patchy South Jersey playground, on a summer Sunday afternoon, soccer coach Daniel Rodriquez paced in front of the bench - a clump of towels, really.

With one minute left, his team, Achuapa, was locked in a tense, 1-1 game with archrival La Mancha. Watching mostly in silence were about 100 spectators, sprawled on blankets and lawn chairs in the beating sun or under tarps tied to a chain-link fence.

At stake for the players in this immigrant soccer league was another step toward the championship game, to be played today at Campbell's Field, Camden's 6,400-seat riverside stadium.

On weekdays, the men are janitors, landscapers, farmhands, and factory workers across the region. Most Sundays from spring through fall, they seek exercise, camaraderie, competition, and bonds of ethnic identity in the sport many knew in their homelands as fútbol.

For decades, immigrant soccer leagues have flourished in ethnic enclaves throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Today, many are made up mainly of Latinos, but also include players from Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Caribbean.

"Most of us are from countries where we didn't have much, and soccer is our common denominator," said Liberian immigrant Joe Capehart, a forklift operator.

Capehart directs field operations for Imperial Azteca, the 900-player amateur league that includes Achuapa, La Mancha, and 26 other teams. It bills itself as the region's "premier" league and is among the largest.

Azteca was founded in Camden in 2003 by Milton Valdovinos, 33, a Mexican immigrant who owns Plaza Tepis Sports on Federal Street, where players often shop for uniforms and equipment.

But the economics of immigrant soccer do not end with striped shirts and shorts.

Including insurance and referees' fees for the 20-game season, each 22-man team pays about $600 a year to enroll in the Azteca league. On some teams, each player antes up his share. For other teams, such as Achuapa, the managers foot the bill. Some might even pay for players' cleats, uniforms - and a few tortillas now and then.

Those are usually available at the games, where league-authorized vendors do a lively business in Latino comfort food: refried beans, sugary Mexican soft drinks, and homemade, wagon-wheel-shaped crisps of fried dough called chicharrines.

In the proud subculture of immigrant soccer, newcomers to America feel at home on the field and the sidelines. And men like Achuapa manager Rodriguez - a cleaning-company manager with enough spare income to subsidize a team - live the dream of a sports career.

A final extravaganza

As the ball squirted free from a jarring tackle in the Achuapa-La Mancha game, fans shouted at the referee, "Es una mano, señor!" It's a hand ball, sir!

The ref ignored them.

Rodriguez, 35, a study in calm, said nothing and seemed confident that his stars, the wily forward Renberto "Diablo" Polanco and hefty fullback Hector "Pork Chop" Aguilar, would come through in the clutch. They played well, but the game ended 1-1.

"Every game is different," explained Rodriguez, reassuring himself he would make the final again this year. "I wasn't really scared because we're always the ones to beat."

So it will be this afternoon.

Achuapa will face Jalapa for the championship at 1, followed by an exhibition game at 4 between Chivas and América, visiting professional teams from Mexico that have been rivals for decades.

In a league rich with players from Latin America, Achuapa and Jalapa are dominated by Guatemalans. Like many teams, they are named for villages or famous teams back home. Most Achuapa players were born in Jutiapa, the half-mile-high town in Guatemala's south-central highlands. Jalapa is a village to the northwest.

Today's final is a far cry from the fields of bad bounces and twisted ankles where previous championships were played.

Valdovinos, Azteca's founder, is the impresario behind the 2009 extravaganza. The costs - including stadium rent, airfare for the two 18-member Mexican teams, accommodations at the Philadelphia Sheraton - could exceed $100,000, he said.

While admission to regular-season games is free, tickets for today's games are $20 and $25. If Campbell's Field sells out, proceeds will be about $150,000. Valdovinos said he would like to use at least a portion of any profit to improve Camden's playing fields.

"This helps, first of all, my business - I don't want to lie," he said. But sprucing up city parks is important, too, "because the soccer fields in this area are not good."

Social goals

Nonetheless, from such challenging turf across the region have sprung many immigrant leagues. There is no definitive number, since some are organized and others are little more than pickup games.

But the common thread goes well beyond sport. Participants across the leagues say the weekly games, while a connection to a familiar past, are also an informal marketplace for new and established immigrants to share information about jobs, affordable housing, and social services.

Liga Amistad, a six-team "Friendship League," was founded in Philadelphia in 2005, with weekly games at Sacks Playground on Washington Avenue in Southwark.

Organizers say the league, made up mostly of Mexicans, was created to address a drinking problem in the community.

"The guys would spend the day kind of partying, doing not-so-productive activities," said Varsovia Fernandez, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and one of the league's volunteer commissioners.

"In the Latino culture, Sunday is a family day. Now soccer brings them together in a healthy, recreational environment, and the wives and children come to watch."

For women who want to do more than watch, there is International Soccer 7, a female league of about 100 members on teams of seven players each. It was founded six years ago in South Philadelphia by Ruth Bull, 42, a player on Mexico's 2000 Olympic team who was sidelined by knee surgery.

For immigrants who work all week to support families in America or send remittances abroad, "soccer gives us something to do. It is a nice pastime," said Antiqua-born Mitch Williams, 41, a home remodeler who lives in Somerdale with his wife and four children.

A sinewy midfielder with a powerful kick, he modestly admitted to being able to "take a shot at a good distance with some force" - affirmed on a recent Sunday by the rocket shot he took from 50 yards out. It seemed to be still accelerating as it sailed over the goal.

As the only English speaker among Hispanics on the team called Juventud, Williams depends on body language and hand signals to communicate.

"When I first started playing, I would get so upset because there were simple little things that could improve the team's quality of play, but I couldn't communicate," said Williams, who is deeply competitive on the field.

"After dealing with it week after week . . . I started to see it from a different perspective," he said. "It's an opportunity to really let go. It's a type of joy we get nowhere else. We've been doing this since we were little kids without shoes in the streets."