On Sep 10, 2007, at 6:14 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> So if you believe that there are no jobs available, how do you explain
> the undocumented immigration to the US in search of jobs? It
> stands to
> reason that there must be jobs available, if people abroad are taking
> considerable risk and cost to come here to work, no? So it follows
> that
> these jobs are also available to the domestic population, which
> demonstrates
> that structural joblessness is an unlikely culprit of high
> incarceration
> rate of the US population.
Employers much prefer to hire Latino immigrants rather than black Americans. There's a fairly large literature on this. Check out Devah Pager's 2003 experiment [quoting from a later paper <http:// www.econ.brown.edu/econ/events/pager&western1.pdf>]: "Fielding teams of black and teams of white job applicants, she found that blacks without criminal records has roughly equal outcomes to whites with felony convictions. That the magnitude of the effect of being black is roughly equivalent to that of being a convicted felon underscores the significance of race in the eyes of Milwaukee employers." The later Pager paper, done with Bruce Western, fielded teams of white, Latino, and black job applicants with identical resumes. Results: "[C] lear evidence for a racial hierarchy in which white and Latino job applicants are significantly preferred by New York employers relative to equally qualified blacks." This is as pure a test of discrimination as you can find, since the employers were judging people with identical qualifications.
Doug