Nativity Penalty and Legal Status Paradox: The Effects of Nativity and Legal Status Signals in the US Labor Market

Foreign-born Latinos face hiring disadvantages in the US labor market compared to native-born Latinos, which may be due to differences in human capital, legal status, or employer bias. However, it is difficult to adjudicate between these explanations because most scholarship documenting hiring inequalities focuses on workers’ experiences and not on employers’ actions. This prevents understanding whether employer discrimination is a mechanism of nativity status inequalities in hiring, particularly among the growing share of Latinos with college degrees. I conduct a correspondence audit study of 1,364 jobs in eight metros to test whether employers screen out college-educated Latino men based on nativity vis-a-vis legal status. Employers were twice as likely to call back native-born as foreign-born Latinos. Paradoxically, however, employers called back documented, work-authorized Latinos at almost the same low rates as undocumented Latinos without the right to work. A national survey experiment of 468 human resources (HR) representatives and interviews with 23 HR representatives and immigration lawyers reveal that individual concerns about foreign-born Latinos’ English language ability, and organizational concerns about their deportability, may explain why HR staff are reluctant to hire foreign-born Latinos. The results highlight the power of both nativist attitudes and immigration laws for hampering the employment chances of even documented, college-educated Latinos.