Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes

“We don’t want to hear about discrimination”: Evidence slippage and evidence invention in the politics of foreign credential recognition in Canada

“…Instead, we find three significant departures from genuine evidence‐informed policymaking. First, we find that despite the abundance of evidence that discrimination contributes to the difficulties immigrants from certain backgrounds experience in finding employment at their level of qualification (Bauder ; Esses, Bennett‐AbuAyyash and Lapshina, ; Oreopoulos ), politicians pay little attention to this reality, and in fact, do so less and less as they get closer to making recommendations. Second, we find that politicians can invent their own evidence by offering creative interpretations of existing research that have little to do with the formal process of soliciting information.…”

Anonymous résumés: An effective preselection method?

“…Carlsson and Rooth () showed that recruiters associated Arab‐Muslim males with incompetence, laziness, and inefficiency rather than with productivity, ambition, and efficiency. In Oreopoulos () study, employers acknowledged that they assume having a name that does not sound English means that the potential employee has poor communication skills, so they do not even bother asking them for an interview. In a recent meta‐analysis Bartkoski, Lynch, Witt, and Rudolph () listed the common stereotypes that describe Arab or Muslim individuals (Arabs being commonly assumed to be Muslim and vice versa): evil, violent, aggressive, greedy, immoral, uncivilized, irrational, inferior, and religious fanatics (Kumar, Warnke, & Karabenick, ; Lipka, ; Naber, ).…”

“…One of most investigated and explicit nonjob‐related information on application forms is applicants’ ethnic origin, discernable in cues like ethnic‐sounding names and the photograph attached to the résumé. Applicants with résumés displaying minority ethnic cues receive 30% to 50% fewer callbacks from recruiting organizations than applicants with equivalent résumés without minority racial cues (Bertrand & Mullainathan, ; Gaddis, ; Oreopoulos, ). A French correspondence test using North African sounding names and ‘foreign’ sounding names with no clear ethnic association concluded that non‐French applications were significantly disfavored compared with the French ones.…”

Why Is Veteran Unemployment So High?

“…Although it is illegal to ask applicants about protected characteristics such as age, gender, and race/ ethnicity, resumes and job applications can be crafted in such a way as to strongly suggest the presence of these characteristics (e.g., through the applicant's name or past work experience). Audit studies have been used to test for the existence of discrimination against a variety of characteristics, although race/ethnicity is the most common focus (see, for example, Bertrand andMullainathan, 2004, andOreopoulos, 2011).…”