Do Asian Americans Face Labor Market Discrimination? Accounting for the Cost of Living among Native-born Men and Women

Abstract

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.

Penalized for Personality: A Case Study of Asian-Origin Disadvantage at the Point of Hire

“…Foreign educational credentials may be lower quality than U.S. credentials (or perceived as such) (Zeng and Xie 2004) or less transferrable in the U.S. context (Bratsberg and Ragan 2002); further, foreign-educated Asian-origin workers may have poor English language ability (Espenshade and Fu 1997) or relatively limited social networks (Sakamoto et al 2009). The Heterogeneity approach also allows for foreign-educated Asian-origin individuals to be penalized for personality-related reasons, either because those differences truly exist due to the difficulty of acculturation (Wang et al 2017) or because employers use stereotypes specific to Asian immigrants when evaluating foreign-educated Asian-origin workers (Oreopoulos 2011). Whether based in truth or not, there is evidence that perceptions of personality differ by Asian immigrant generation.…”

“… 4. Later studies confirmed Kim and Sakamoto’s (2010) suspicion that the wage penalty they found for U.S.-born Asian men was due to overcontrolling for geographic region, as U.S.-born Asian men choose to live on the west coast where wages are higher (e.g., Wang et al 2017). …”

“…Theoretical approaches, moreover, offer conflicting predictions as to who within the Asian-origin population is affected by a personality-based penalty at the point of hire. The Model Minority Myth perspective would suggest that employers penalize Asian-origin workers in general for perceived personality faults (Chou and Feagin 2008; Lee and Kye 2016), whereas the Heterogeneity approach suggests that such a penalty, if one exists, is relegated to Asian-origin workers educated in a foreign country (Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Wang, Takei, and Sakamoto 2017). In this paper, I address these theoretical and empirical blind spots by turning to a case study of software engineering hiring at mid-sized Silicon Valley firm I call InGen.…”

Deconstructing hyper-selectivity: Are the socioeconomic attainments of second-generation Asian Americans only due to their class background?

“…A bachelor’s degree in many STEM fields actually yields higher lifetime earnings than a graduate degree in many non-STEM areas (Kim et al., 2015). As is well-known, Asian Americans are over-represented in prestigious American universities and in higher-paying STEM-related fields of study (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Wang et al., 2017; Zhou and Lee, 2017). For this reason, the claims made by Zhou and Lee (2017: 10), Tran et al.…”

“…Caudill and De Vos, 1956; Jiménez and Horowitz, 2013; Kasinitz et al., 2008; Kitano, 1976; Lee and Zhou, 2015; Petersen, 1966; Schneider and Lee, 1990) . The higher levels of educational attainment along with their chosen fields of study result in higher levels of income and occupational attainment among Asian Americans (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Sakamoto and Hsu, 2020; Wang et al., 2017; Xie and Goyette, 2003).…”