Two years ago, Alex Herrera said he would get sometimes two or three offers a day of lucrative construction jobs while waiting for work on Roosevelt Avenue. Now, the 25-year-old Mexican immigrant and others who line up in Queens each morning are lucky to be offered two or three jobs a week.

A new report finds that Hispanic workers — particularly Mexican immigrants in the construction trades — are bearing the brunt of a national economic slowdown. The findings show a “dramatic reversal” for Hispanics, according to the report by the Pew Hispanic Center.

For the first time in five years, foreign-born Hispanics have seen their unemployment rate climb above that of native-born Hispanics, to 7.5%.

The report’s author, Rakesh Kochhar, said that in previous recessions, Hispanics — in contrast to African-American workers — have generally been hit as hard as the rest of the population, and then have been able to bounce back.

After a recession in 2001 and an economic slowdown before 2004, the unemployment rate hit a historic high for Hispanics, but then it plummeted, according to the data collected in the study.

One of the main reasons Hispanic immigrants were able to rebound from the 2003 slowdown was a construction boom: Hispanics took 300,000 new construction jobs in 2006. Then, in 2007, they nearly lost them all.

Two years ago, Mr. Herrera said, “there was a lot of work. Now there’s less, and they pay less.”

He came to America three years ago by swimming across the Rio Grande, and for the past two years has sent home about $2,000 a week to his mother and grandmother. Now he struggles to send between $100 and $150 a week.

Two years ago, Mr. Herrera and other day laborers said, they were being paid a minimum of $10 an hour and were constantly supplied with work. Most offers they receive now for brick or cement laying jobs pay either $7 or $8 an hour, which covers their bills in this country, but not the ones at home as well.

An immigrant from Peru, Cesar Basques, 44, recently was one of six Peruvian men waiting along Roosevelt Avenue for work, all snapping to attention at the sound of a slowing sedan. He said that, despite the economic slowdown, the number of men looking for construction work hasn’t dwindled.

“People keep coming because people here call home and lie about how bad the situation is,” Mr. Basques said.

In this latest economic slow down, Mr. Kochhar said immigrants from Mexico accounted for 91% of the increase in unemployment for Hispanics, with the employment rate among Mexican immigrants dropping to 63.8% in the first quarter of 2008, from 65.9% in the last quarter of 2007.

Foreign-born Hispanics are also contributing less than before to the growth of the Hispanic workforce, a trend that could be linked to recent crackdowns against illegal immigrants, the report said.

Although Mr. Kochhar said he could not calculate whether illegal or legal immigrants had been more affected by the rise in joblessness, he noted that Mexicans make up more than half of illegal immigrants, and that illegal immigrants are overrepresented in the construction industry when compared with other groups.

Mr. Kochhar said Hispanic women were also losing jobs at startling rates, but he said the trend could likely be attributed to their more tenuous connection to the labor market. Only about half of Hispanic women of a working age tend to take jobs in general, compared to more than two-thirds for other groups. More of their jobs were lost in industries like meatpacking, he said.

Despite their troubles, Mr. Kochar said Hispanics appear to be hanging on and trying to find new work instead of dropping out of the labor force altogether — or going back to their home countries.

Some of the day laborers scattered along Roosevelt Avenue were less optimistic than Mr. Kochar’s report.

“If I’m going to stay here, not get work, and pay to maintain myself and my family back home, I may as well go home,” Mr. Basques said.

Mr. Herrera was more definite: “I’m going to stay three or four more months and then I’m going back.”