For Immediate Release: Thursday, november 18, 2010
Contact: Phoebe Silag or Karen Conner, news@epi.org 202-775-8810

A new Economic Policy Institute Issue Brief, Different Race, Different Recession: American Indian Unemployment in 2010, finds that the national unemployment rate for American Indians has increased 7.7 percentage points, to 15.2%, since the beginning of the recession. This increase is 1.6 times the size of that for white workers over the same time period. The report, by EPI researcher Algernon Austin, also finds that joblessness among American Indians is characterized by extreme regional disparities. Alaska Natives in Alaska and American Indians in the Midwest had the highest rates of unemployment in the first half of 2010.