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Being nonwhite, Asian Americans are an important case in understanding racial/ethnic inequality. Prior research has focused on native-born workers to reduce unobserved heterogeneity associated with immigrants. Native-born Asian American adults are concentrated, however, in areas with a high cost of living where wages tend to be higher. Regional location is thus said to inflate the wages of Asians. Given that many labor markets are national in scope with regional migration being common, current place of residence is unlikely to be a fully exogenous independent variable. We use two-stage least squares to estimate wage regression models in which the cost of living is endogenous because people with higher wages can afford to live in more expensive areas. The results fail to reject the hypothesis of no racial discrimination. Native-born Asian Americans seem to have overcome the disadvantage of being nonwhite in the labor market at least in regard to wages.

We use the U.S. General Social Survey to investigate the overall life satisfaction of Asian Americans. In contrast to most other racial minority groups in the U.S., Asian Americans are advantaged over whites in regard to education and incomes which are known to be correlated with overall life satisfaction. Despite these socioeconomic advantages, Asian Americans express somewhat lower levels of overall life satisfaction than whites. Foreign-born Asian Americans are more likely than whites to be "not too happy" while native-born Asian Americans are less likely than whites to be "very happy." This pattern persists even after controlling for educational attainment and the distribution of household income. The implications of these findings are discussed in regard to the social psychology, assimilation, and demographic characteristics of Asian Americans. Asian Americans are often portrayed as the "Model Minority," but they appear to be somewhat less happy with what they have.

Background and Objective: Vaccine hesitancy may be one of the greatest challenges to conquering the COVID-19 pandemic. Underserved communities across the U.S. have been suffering from the pandemic in unique ways, and vaccine hesitancy may exacerbate or prolong these issues. However, the prevalence of vaccine uptake and hesitancy in these vulnerable populations is unknown. The present study aimed to investigate: (1) prevalence of COVID vaccine uptake and COVID vaccine hesitancy in Delaware's underserved communities; (2) factors (i.e., demographic, socioeconomic characteristics, as well as COVID-related behaviors) associated with vaccine hesitancy; and (3) specific concerns about COVID vaccines. Materials and Methods: Data were extracted from a survey conducted in Delaware's underserved communities from March 4, 2021 to May 25, 2021. Logistic regression analyses were used to assess factors associated with vaccine hesitancy. Results: Results from our survey indicated that vaccine uptake is lower in Delaware's underserved communities than Delaware overall and the national average. In addition, a considerable proportion of participants were categorized as vaccine hesitant. We also found that being black increased the likelihood of vaccine hesitancy for the COVID-19 vaccine, which is consistent with prior studies on vaccine hesitancy. Results also indicated that having been tested for COVID in the past decreased the odds of vaccine hesitancy. However, we did not find that demographic or socioeconomic characteristics played a role in vaccine hesitancy in Delaware's underserved communities. Conclusion and Relevance: Our study represents a critial first step in understanding the determinants driving COVID vaccine uptake and hesitancy. Identifying key factors and causes for vaccine hesitancy may help in establishing novel strategies that counteract low vaccination rates in underserved communities.

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We use data from the Current Population Survey from 2007 and 2013 to investigate demographic differentials in unemployment during the Great Recession in the U.S. Although our analysis is primarily exploratory and descriptive, our major research objective is to illuminate the unemployment differential between the foreign born and the native born. The findings indicate that during the height of the Great Recession, the foreign born had higher unemployment rates than the native born. However, this differential is statistically explained by their observed characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, gender, age and education. With the net of those variables and a few other demographic covariates, foreign born workers as an overall group actually had somewhat lower chances of being unemployed than native born workers. This finding is discussed in terms of the selectivity of immigrant workers and the possibility that they are somewhat more immediately dependent on having a job. After breaking down the foreign born into major racial/ethnic groups, the results suggest that foreign-born blacks and foreign-born Hispanics are particularly selective with the net of their observed characteristics. The possible sources of such differentials by race/ethnicity and by gender are discussed.

We investigate demographic data on the socioeconomic attainments of the population of persons who identify as being "yellow" (i.e., amarelo in Portuguese) in regard to their racial classification in Brazil. The majority of these persons have a Japanese heritage, while much smaller proportions have a Chinese or Korean heritage (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE] 2011). Our primary substantive focus is on Japanese Brazilians because they have not been extensively considered in prior recent literature. For comparative purposes, however, we also conduct a similar statistical analysis for Japanese Americans.Racial differentials between whites and blacks are often considered in studies of inequality, and 585150S REXXX10.1177/2332649215585150Sociology of Race and EthnicityMaia et al. AbstractThis paper investigates the socioeconomic attainments of Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Americans. The findings indicate that Japanese Brazilians have higher levels of education and wages than white Brazilians, while Japanese Americans have higher levels of education and wages than white Americans. These results are inconsistent with a conventional "white supremacy" model that is popular in contemporary American sociology. We argue that that model needs to be reformulated to more systematically encompass class characteristics such as education given their salience in the twenty-first century. When smaller demographic minority groups are able to obtain high levels of a scarce class resource that is greatly valued in a competitive economy, racist relations against them in the labor market may be ameliorated. In this case, the cost of discriminating against the minority greatly exceeds the gain by not discriminating. With "white supremacy," white employers and white employees are rewarded with a long-term racial dividend by engaging in short-term public goods behaviors (i.e., a discriminatory "united front") that promote institutionalized racism. Because economic transactions with a very small minority group are so limited, whites as a whole do not commonly receive much long-term economic gain from discriminating against them. The maintenance of institutionalized racism against a very small minority group with high levels of class credentials therefore breaks down as individual whites are more economically rewarded by hiring and transacting with productive members of the minority group in the short-term rather than waiting for a long-term racial dividend that is likely to be trivial.