Carlos, 33, remembers the 2016 election like it was yesterday.
That was the night he got his long-awaited green card. Before then, he had been working under the table at odd jobs — or worse, for employers who withheld his wages — while living in the country without legal permission. With his green card in hand, he could finally work lawfully in the U.S.
He submitted an application to a job at a local public servant’s office. He had majored in political science at a U.S. college, and working in politics was his American Dream. Yet he was turned down for the job.
He didn’t know why. Carlos finally had what he needed to work, a college degree and his green card, but the door was slammed shut anyway. Carlos isn’t alone.
Across the United States, Latinos who were born abroad, even if they have legal papers, the right to work and college degrees, aren’t hired at the same rate as Latinos born in the U.S. And even though many policy advocates assume that giving more individuals the legal right to work via green cards is the best way for them to get jobs, my research suggests that the right to work is not enough unless employers treat workers equally too.
News outlets as early as 1916 have been talking about “the American Dream,” as an editorial in the Chicago Daily Tribune shows — supporting the belief that economic success is attainable for everyone who works hard. But Latinos have long argued that their American Dream is not possible because employers discriminate against them based on where they are born.
Unfortunately, that’s extremely difficult to prove. Employers can argue that they turn down foreign-born candidates based on individual failures such as less experience, no college degree or a lack of fluency in English.
So in 2019, I came up with a plan to find out what would happen if companies were faced with two equally educated, equally trained Latinos applying for a job: one born in the U.S. and one born abroad. This is a real-life academic experiment called a correspondence audit study. I sent out resumes online to 1,364 job postings in eight of the country’s largest metropolitan areas, including Chicago. The resumes — representing fictitious Latino male college graduates — were identical in every way except for whether they were born on American soil.
I was shocked to see just how often employers discriminated against the foreign-born candidates. Employers called back the foreign-born candidates for a job interview nearly half as often as native-born candidates — even when foreign-born candidates signaled that they had green cards and legal documentation. That’s like native Chicagoans’ chances of a callback being cut in half just because they were born in one neighborhood over another.
For the last decade, I’ve seen firsthand the damage caused by this kind of illegal hiring discrimination. Immigrants make vital contributions to the U.S. economy — in what they purchase, where they live and how they work. In both high- and low-skilled jobs, immigrants fill important labor shortages, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When people are able to put themselves through college, get a degree and still find themselves shut out of a job simply due to where they were born, the entire economy suffers. So do all of our civil rights.
The social spending bill promoted by President Joe Biden advocates for administering more unused green cards under the premise that giving more people work rights will get more people working. While I agree that more people should get green cards, my research shows that rights to work are not enough to grant access to work — especially if employers disregard that fundamental civil right. In addition, lawmakers must better prevent employers from breaking discrimination law.
Currently, the only way employers are punished for breaking discrimination law is if workers themselves file a complaint after the fact. But these complaints are notoriously hard to prove, especially given that employers can retaliate against potential hires and they have far more power and resources. Instead, federal and state offices should help employers prevent discrimination in the first place, such as by requiring employers to collect transparent, publicly available data on the hiring process.
No one should be discriminated against simply based on where they were born. We must protect our communities, in Chicago and nationally, from this insidious civil rights violation.
After all, people can’t work hard toward their American Dream without first having an opportunity to work.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
A. Nicole Kreisberg is a David E. Bell postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies.
