Re-Emerging Inequality: Narrow Economic Gaps between Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Offspring Widen Over the Life Course

Scholarship investigating economic disparities between immigrants and non- immigrants posits that immigrants’ income disadvantages decline over time and across generations, but life course approaches contend that inequalities between groups widen as individuals age. Using data from the NLSY 1997, I show that the relative economic positions of children of Latino immigrants shift over the life course when compared to children of White and Black non-immigrants. Average family income among children of Latino immigrants resembles that of the children of White non-immigrants at age 25. But children of White non-immigrants experience faster income growth as they age, tending to outrank the children of Latino immigrants by the early thirties. Accounting for intergenerational legacies of disadvantage shows that children of Latino immigrants initially outrank the children of White non-immigrants from similar economic backgrounds – an “intergenerational premium” – but this intergenerational premium erodes with age. Contra the segmented assimilation hypothesis, children of Latino immigrants maintain favorable positions relative to children of Black non-immigrants regardless of parental income. These findings suggest that the temporal patterns of economic convergence between immigrants and non-immigrants are not linear. Though intergenerational progress is substantial, the life course is a critical period through which inequalities can be made anew.

Nativity Penalty, Legal Status Paradox: The Effects of Nativity and Legal Status Signals in the U.S. Labor Market

Combining field experimental, survey, and interview data, this article examines whether and why employers screen higher-educated Latino men based on nativity and legal status. The field experiment, a correspondence audit study of 1,364 real jobs in eight cities, shows that employers are twice as likely to call back native-born as foreign-born Latinos. Paradoxically, however, employers do not differentially screen foreign-born Latinos based on legal status: employers called back documented green card holders with full work rights at almost the same rates as undocumented Latinos without the right to work. A national survey experiment of 468 HR representatives, and interviews with 23 HR representatives and immigration lawyers, reveal that individual and organizational mechanisms explain why employers are reluctant to hire Latino immigrants, regardless of their legal standing. Individually, employers hold nativist views about Latino immigrants’ English language ability, which they perceive could threaten workplace culture. And organizationally, employers associate Latino immigrants with immigration enforcement and deportation, which they perceive could threaten workplace stability. Ultimately, the results point to the power of individual perceptions and immigration laws for hampering the employment of even documented college-educated Latinos.