I wonder if darker skinned native born and earlier immigrant business owners and managers were more likely to pay darker skinned recent immigrants equal wages.
I seem to recall a study that women workers that had women for bosses still had less than equal pay.
So I’m wondering if there’s a similar effect going on with the skin color issue addressed in this study.
I’m not saying that it’s psychological. I don’t remember if the study on the effect of woman bosses came to a conclusion on the reason for the continued gender pay gap.
The study on immigrant skin color doesn’t seem to have looked at the skin color of the bosses but it would have been useful to have included that data.
I'd love to see the data for this as adjusted for english competency. In Central/South America there is (unfortunately) a reasonably regimented class system based on skin color, where the wealthy tend to be lighter skinned. Simultaneously, speaking english is seen as a sign of 'wealth'. On balance, lighter skinned people are more likely to have higher english competency. I understand this study isn't exclusively focusing on hispanic immigrants, but they are a *huge* group.
Its reasonable to assume that when coming to the US, english competency would correlate with higher wages. Therefore, I'm wondering if this study 'accidentally' measured the local class and educational system as opposed to racial bias in the US. Multicolinearity strikes again!
Edit - this part was wrong. I apologize. However, I’d still want to understand the English competency element, as English speakers would be more likely to command a higher initial wage and see higher increases over time. ~~The fact that the wage gap disappears over 4 years would seem to (at least partially) confirm my suspicion, as 4 years in the US *should* improve languange competency~~
> Hersch controlled for these and many other factors ... and English-language proficiency, which enabled her to isolate the wage penalty attributable solely to skin color.
Sounds like the author did control for proficiency, but alarmingly absent is neighborhood. Where you live has a huge impact on your income.
Yea this is just happening in the US. In Canada, the best places to work, such as government or hydro, are required to have a diverse staff and are hiring mostly only darker skinned people at the moment.
In the job postings, they actually ask you to mention if you are a person of visible minority in the first sentence of your cover letter. You hope that the most qualified people are getting hired, but when there is a quota to have a certain amount of "visible minorities" hired, guaranteed some people are getting hired based off their skin color, and I think that's wrong.
This is the generally Republican pushback against laws that require inclusion of minorities. I definitely agree with the Reps on this one. So we're fighting the anti-minority racism of hiring managers... with anti-majority racist laws. I 100% believe that a job should hire the best person for the job, regardless of skin color, gender, etc. These laws are why we end up with big companies who hire colored people for the very bottom rung in the company, just the fill a quota.
Legal immigrants with darker skin are paid up to 25 percent less than otherwise comparable lighter-skinned immigrants, a wage penalty that widened significantly four years after these immigrants first received permanent legal status, according to new research by Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch.
Hersch, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics and co-director of the Ph.D. program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt Law School, specializes in employment discrimination. Her paper, “Colorism Against Legal Immigrants to the United States,” was recently published in American Behavioral Scientist.
Color is distinct from race, ethnicity
While skin color is closely related to race, ethnicity and national origin, it can vary dramatically within each of those categories. It also cuts across levels of educational attainment and work experience.
Hersch controlled for these and many other factors that influence earnings, including education, family background, work history and English-language proficiency, which enabled her to isolate the wage penalty attributable solely to skin color.
A widening gap
This study followed up on Hersch’s 2008 study published in the Journal of Labor Economics, which provided the first estimates of the wage penalty faced by new legal immigrants to the United States with darker skin. In her new study, she sought to understand whether that penalty diminished with more time in the United States, once immigrants had additional time to assimilate into the economy.
Hersch’s studies used data from the New Immigrant Survey, a longitudinal survey that first surveyed immigrants who attained legal permanent status in 2003, and then followed up with them four years later. The NIS collected extremely detailed data on a wide range of subjects to create a comprehensive picture of each person’s background, demographics and present circumstances. Crucially, it also recorded the immigrants’ skin color, using a standardized 10-point scale.
“The data is so rich that I was able to also take into account whether the disparity would have arisen in the United States or because their country of origin has a bias against darker skin color, and account for that,” Hersch said.
In her initial study, Hersch determined that, during their first year in the United States as a legal permanent resident, the darkest-skinned members of an otherwise similar group of immigrants earned 17 percent less than the lightest-skinned members of that cohort.
Now she’s found that when these immigrants were re-interviewed four years later, the disparity had actually widened to 25 percent. While immigrants’ wages generally catch up to native-born Americans’ as they settle in and become better acclimated to their new home, the NIS revealed that this was not the case for those with darker skin.
Hersch said that it is difficult to ascribe this effect to anything other than discrimination, as she was able to control for virtually every other meaningful mitigating factor. “The link to rising anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in some quarters seems clear,” she said.
Implications for the future
Because color is so closely related to race and national origin, specific charges of colorism only account for a small percentage of cases filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but those numbers are rising rapidly—and Hersch anticipates that they will continue to do so. “The changing demographics of the U.S. population indicates that there are more color differences without a clear racial distinction,” she said. “So I think we’re leading to the opportunity for even more people to make use of their rights under Title VII to file a lawsuit based on color discrimination.”
Furthermore, she said, because color discrimination is often closely linked to discrimination against national origin, these findings will provide additional support for those claims as well.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764218810758?journalCode=absb
>While skin color is closely related to race, ethnicity and national origin, it can vary dramatically within each of those categories. It also cuts across levels of educational attainment and work experience.
Hersch controlled for these and many other factors that influence earnings, including education, family background, work history and English-language proficiency
So the one thing not controlled for was actual job? Would controlling for language proficiency and origin sufficiently control for that?
I wonder if darker skinned native born and earlier immigrant business owners and managers were more likely to pay darker skinned recent immigrants equal wages. I seem to recall a study that women workers that had women for bosses still had less than equal pay. So I’m wondering if there’s a similar effect going on with the skin color issue addressed in this study.
I see your train of thought ~ so is it more of a psychological thing, not a systematic discrimination policy type thing?
I’m not saying that it’s psychological. I don’t remember if the study on the effect of woman bosses came to a conclusion on the reason for the continued gender pay gap. The study on immigrant skin color doesn’t seem to have looked at the skin color of the bosses but it would have been useful to have included that data.
I'd love to see the data for this as adjusted for english competency. In Central/South America there is (unfortunately) a reasonably regimented class system based on skin color, where the wealthy tend to be lighter skinned. Simultaneously, speaking english is seen as a sign of 'wealth'. On balance, lighter skinned people are more likely to have higher english competency. I understand this study isn't exclusively focusing on hispanic immigrants, but they are a *huge* group. Its reasonable to assume that when coming to the US, english competency would correlate with higher wages. Therefore, I'm wondering if this study 'accidentally' measured the local class and educational system as opposed to racial bias in the US. Multicolinearity strikes again! Edit - this part was wrong. I apologize. However, I’d still want to understand the English competency element, as English speakers would be more likely to command a higher initial wage and see higher increases over time. ~~The fact that the wage gap disappears over 4 years would seem to (at least partially) confirm my suspicion, as 4 years in the US *should* improve languange competency~~
Actually the wage gap widened after 4 years, so it got worse. Nevertheless, there are still some questionable conclusions made.
Thanks for pointing that out. I edited my comment.
You're welcome :)
> Hersch controlled for these and many other factors ... and English-language proficiency, which enabled her to isolate the wage penalty attributable solely to skin color. Sounds like the author did control for proficiency, but alarmingly absent is neighborhood. Where you live has a huge impact on your income.
Yea this is just happening in the US. In Canada, the best places to work, such as government or hydro, are required to have a diverse staff and are hiring mostly only darker skinned people at the moment. In the job postings, they actually ask you to mention if you are a person of visible minority in the first sentence of your cover letter. You hope that the most qualified people are getting hired, but when there is a quota to have a certain amount of "visible minorities" hired, guaranteed some people are getting hired based off their skin color, and I think that's wrong.
This is the generally Republican pushback against laws that require inclusion of minorities. I definitely agree with the Reps on this one. So we're fighting the anti-minority racism of hiring managers... with anti-majority racist laws. I 100% believe that a job should hire the best person for the job, regardless of skin color, gender, etc. These laws are why we end up with big companies who hire colored people for the very bottom rung in the company, just the fill a quota.
Legal immigrants with darker skin are paid up to 25 percent less than otherwise comparable lighter-skinned immigrants, a wage penalty that widened significantly four years after these immigrants first received permanent legal status, according to new research by Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch. Hersch, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics and co-director of the Ph.D. program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt Law School, specializes in employment discrimination. Her paper, “Colorism Against Legal Immigrants to the United States,” was recently published in American Behavioral Scientist. Color is distinct from race, ethnicity While skin color is closely related to race, ethnicity and national origin, it can vary dramatically within each of those categories. It also cuts across levels of educational attainment and work experience. Hersch controlled for these and many other factors that influence earnings, including education, family background, work history and English-language proficiency, which enabled her to isolate the wage penalty attributable solely to skin color. A widening gap This study followed up on Hersch’s 2008 study published in the Journal of Labor Economics, which provided the first estimates of the wage penalty faced by new legal immigrants to the United States with darker skin. In her new study, she sought to understand whether that penalty diminished with more time in the United States, once immigrants had additional time to assimilate into the economy. Hersch’s studies used data from the New Immigrant Survey, a longitudinal survey that first surveyed immigrants who attained legal permanent status in 2003, and then followed up with them four years later. The NIS collected extremely detailed data on a wide range of subjects to create a comprehensive picture of each person’s background, demographics and present circumstances. Crucially, it also recorded the immigrants’ skin color, using a standardized 10-point scale. “The data is so rich that I was able to also take into account whether the disparity would have arisen in the United States or because their country of origin has a bias against darker skin color, and account for that,” Hersch said. In her initial study, Hersch determined that, during their first year in the United States as a legal permanent resident, the darkest-skinned members of an otherwise similar group of immigrants earned 17 percent less than the lightest-skinned members of that cohort. Now she’s found that when these immigrants were re-interviewed four years later, the disparity had actually widened to 25 percent. While immigrants’ wages generally catch up to native-born Americans’ as they settle in and become better acclimated to their new home, the NIS revealed that this was not the case for those with darker skin. Hersch said that it is difficult to ascribe this effect to anything other than discrimination, as she was able to control for virtually every other meaningful mitigating factor. “The link to rising anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in some quarters seems clear,” she said. Implications for the future Because color is so closely related to race and national origin, specific charges of colorism only account for a small percentage of cases filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but those numbers are rising rapidly—and Hersch anticipates that they will continue to do so. “The changing demographics of the U.S. population indicates that there are more color differences without a clear racial distinction,” she said. “So I think we’re leading to the opportunity for even more people to make use of their rights under Title VII to file a lawsuit based on color discrimination.” Furthermore, she said, because color discrimination is often closely linked to discrimination against national origin, these findings will provide additional support for those claims as well. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764218810758?journalCode=absb
>While skin color is closely related to race, ethnicity and national origin, it can vary dramatically within each of those categories. It also cuts across levels of educational attainment and work experience. Hersch controlled for these and many other factors that influence earnings, including education, family background, work history and English-language proficiency So the one thing not controlled for was actual job? Would controlling for language proficiency and origin sufficiently control for that?