Language and Citizenship May Contribute to Low Internet Use Among Hispanics

While the United States has made great strides in recent years to close the digital divide, the latest National Telecommunications and Information Administration data on Internet and computer use suggest that gaps remain among certain groups.

The Hispanic community faces some key challenges:

• July 2013 data reveal disparities in Internet use based on citizenship status (see Figure 1). More specifically, persons who were born in the United States were 10 percentage points more likely to use the Internet than foreign-born non-citizens (72.5 percent compared to 62 percent).
• Additionally, persons living in households where Spanish is the only language spoken were far less likely to use the Internet (see Figure 2). The difference in home Internet use between persons living in households where Spanish is the only language spoken by adults and those in other households was nearly 30 percentage points.

Even when holding a range of demographic factors constant, including family income, education, age, race, sex, disability status, employment status, the presence of school-age children at home, population density, and region, statistical modeling suggests that language barriers and non-citizenship are negative indicators of Internet use.

• Controlling for demographic factors, individuals who were 15 years or older and identified as Hispanic were slightly more than 10 percentage points less likely than White non-Hispanics to use the Internet.
• When adding citizenship status to the model, the estimated gap in Internet use between Hispanics and White non-Hispanics drops to 7 percentage points. Furthermore, controlling for language barriers in addition to citizenship causes the gap between these two groups to drop further to 6 percentage points.
• By comparison, African Americans were approximately 7 percentage points less likely to use the Internet than White non-Hispanics. That estimate does not change substantially when adding citizenship and language to the model.