More broadly, the surge in Hispanic employment reflects an increasingly robust recovery. Economists generally say that the job prospects of lower-skill workers are more sensitive to the economy’s tidal movements than those with better skills, and Hispanics, as a group, tend to be less educated than blacks and whites.

In 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of foreign-born Hispanics age 25 and older, and 19.6 percent of Hispanics in that age group who were born in the United States, lacked a high school diploma. The corresponding number for blacks was 16.6 percent, and 8.5 percent for whites. If Hispanic employment is surging, it’s a decent indication that the recovery has taken hold.

The second reason behind lower Hispanic unemployment is a sharp decline in illegal immigration in recent years, which has reduced the number of workers who might otherwise have turned up in government unemployment statistics.

At the recent peak in the mid-2000s, federal agents were apprehending just over one million undocumented migrants a year along the southern border. That number fell by roughly half during the recession, then dribbled to 340,000 in 2011. The collapse in apprehensions of immigrants from Mexico, by far the largest source of undocumented labor, was even sharper.

The reason for the drop was twofold, said Madeline Zavodny, an economist at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. First, economic conditions in Mexico were improving even as growth in the United States remained sluggish, reducing a crucial incentive to emigrate.

On top of that was a development that should warm the hearts of Tea Party supporters: enforcement. Thanks to the rapid militarization of the border — the number of border patrol agents has increased by two-thirds since 2006 — crossing into the United States is now a far more daunting proposition than before the recession.

“It’s more costly in terms of what you have to pay a coyote, how remote you have to go,” Ms. Zavodny said.