Vice President Harris will travel to Raleigh, N.C., Monday, making a stop to discuss Latino small businesses at a public forum, The Hill has learned.
In Raleigh, Harris will join a panel discussion with Small Business Administration Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzmán and Vicky García, senior vice president of the Latino Community Credit Union, a financial institution founded in 2000 in response to a wave of muggings of immigrants in Durham, N.C.
The panel will be moderated by Jorge Buzo, the local Univision affiliate’s news and community coordinator and a former Telemundo anchor in Atlanta.
Though the Latino community has grown substantially in states like North Carolina — Latinos make up about 10 percent of the state’s population, according to the U.S. Census — Hispanic outreach usually targets states that historically have had a large Latino population.
States like North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in part because of their agricultural industry, have attracted a substantial number of Hispanic immigrants.
In North Carolina, however, about 6 in 10 Hispanics are U.S.-born, according to a report published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Harris’s focus on small business is also targeted to the Hispanic community’s top concerns nationwide, employment and the economy.
According to the Small Business Administration, nearly 1 in 4 new businesses is Hispanic-owned, and Hispanic-owned businesses employ about a million workers, with more than $100 billion in annual payroll.
Harris will be joined by Gov. Roy Cooper (D), Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin (D), North Carolina Democratic Reps. Wiley Nickel, Valerie Foushee, and Deborah Ross, and National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders President and CEO Marla Bilonick.
The vice president last visited North Carolina’s Research Triangle in September to pitch the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, according to local station ABC11.