According to this year’s edition of the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report, nearly 67 percent of victims of ethnicity-based hate crimes in 2010 were Hispanic.
Of the 1,122 hate crime victims reported to the FBI in 2010, 747 of them (66.6 percent) were Hispanic. The remaining victims were split between all other ethnicities. In 2009, only 45 percent of the ethnic-bias hate crimes were against Hispanic victims.
While the majority of ethnic-bias hate crimes were against Hispanics, overall the most victimized groups in 2010 were African-Americans and those of the Jewish faith.
Though the reason for the increase in anti-Latino hate crimes is not definitively known, the release of the FBI report comes at a time when anti-illegal immigration legislation is spreading to a number of states.
