It took a 777-point nose dive of the stock market for many Americans to realize that the crisis in the financial sector is the real deal. The multibillion-dollar package to rescue Wall Street got a little more support among tax-payers when they finally understood that as bad as it sounds, not approving it could be much worse. Not to mention that so many people saw thousands of dollars wiped out from their retirement accounts overnight.

Almost everyone in the U.S. -- young or old, rich or poor -- is or has been, in one way or another, affected by the economic crisis facing our nation. But according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, the economic slump has disproportionately affected Latino workers, who make up 14 percent of the job market in the U.S.

Here's how. In the first quarter of 2008, the unemployment rate for Latino immigrants was 7.5 percent. The high unemployment rate is mostly due to the slump in the construction industry, where 250,000 Hispanics lost their jobs. Some 52 percent of working-age Latinos in the United States are immigrants, the study points out.

In a bad economy, the first jobs to go happen to be the ones held by unskilled immigrant workers. There are cutbacks in the service industry, in restaurants, in hotels and in manufacturing. People cutting corners in their expenses lay off their domestic help or gardening services. Day laborers end up spending the entire day standing on street corners with not a single job opportunity.

This has a domino effect on immigrants' everyday lives. By not having a job or by seeing their salaries reduced, it is more difficult for them to cover their expenses, including the higher costs of food and fuel. Their dire situation is also reflected in the amount of money they send back home to their families. Remittances from the U.S. are an important source of revenue for most Latin American countries. In the month of August, remittances to Mexico were down 12 percent, according to Mexico's Central Bank, compared with the same month last year. Remittances are the second source of revenue in that country, after the oil industry.

Financial guru Julie Stav also has seen a disproportionate amount of Latinos being hit by the crisis in the housing industry. A study conducted by her firm in Los Angeles found that a high percentage of Latinos were among those who received the now-infamous subprime mortgage loans that are causing so many to lose their homes to foreclosures.

In her study, Stav found that 50 percent of the people who were losing their homes did not go to the bank to try to find a solution. That is because many of them got loans from the same person who sold them their house.

"We got into loans we didn't understand and signed them with people who couldn't back them up, and we are not dealing with it by contacting banks," they say.

"Most people we spoke to did not understand the concept of adjustable rate mortgages," says Stav.

As a result, they did not know why their payments suddenly went from $1,500 a month to $2,300, for example. It is the lack of information on such a complex issue in a language that they can understand that has a lot of Latino families afraid and unaware of how to deal with this financial crisis.

That probably has some bearing on the results of another survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, in which Latinos seemed to be increasingly pessimistic about their situation in the United States.

Half of those surveyed said their situation is worse now than it was a year ago.

Stav believes a fundamental error that Latino immigrants in this country have made is not realizing that the American dream is "not just buying a home, but being able to keep it."

For those, the dream has turned into a nightmare.

Maria Elena Salinas can be reached at www.mariaesalinas.com.

(Oct. 4, 2008)