Shocking: Today, Life in the South for Poor Latinos Is Pure Hell!

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 23, 2009.

Polls show that a majority of Americans are concerned about illegal immigration, and blanket accusations of racism and xenophobia are hurled around by many immigrant rights activists far too freely. But the kind of offenses detailed in the SPLC study shows that ethnicity plays a huge role in the lives of both Latino immigrants and low-income American workers of Hispanic descent.

In terms of discrimination on the job, that connection is backed by hard data. While anti-immigrant hard-liners go to great pains to portray the issue as a matter of "law and order," a study of legal immigrants conducted by Vanderbilt University economist Joni Hersch found that, among the foreign-born, the level of workplace discrimination increases the further a worker’s physical appearance is from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon ideal.

As Washington Post columnist Richard Morin wrote of the study, "legal immigrants to the United States who had darker complexions or were shorter earned less money than their fair-skinned or taller counterparts with similar jobs, training and backgrounds. Even swarthy whites from abroad earned less than those with lighter skin." In fact, "Hersch estimated that the negative impact of skin tone on earnings was equal to the benefit of education, with a particularly dark complexion virtually wiping out the advantage of education on earnings… Taller immigrants also earned more, she found, with every extra inch worth about 1 percent in earnings."

In other words, that hip, sexy British bartender with the blond hair and blue eyes may be welcomed in American society with open arms, but the little brown guy cleaning the beer taps after closing time gets the shaft, even if he's gone through the exact same legal channels to get here.

Hersch told Morin that she had controlled for "everything that could possibly matter." But there it was: skin-tone and height -- the more different from "us" -- from our ideal phenotype -- legal immigrants are, the less they earn. "I don't think that any explanation other than discrimination is possible," she concluded, "and I am not one to draw such inferences lightly."

An important take-away from the SPLC study is how easily that kind of discrimination spills over from illegal immigrants to a whole community. The foreign-born make up about 10 percent of the population, and unauthorized foreign workers about 5 percent of the labor force. The harsh crack-downs favored by the Bush administration after efforts to reform the system died in the Senate have not only been ripe for horrific abuses, they’ve also failed miserably.

The only way to assure that the issue of illegal immigration doesn’t remain a justification for the kind of routine abuses detailed by the Southern Poverty Law Center is to reform the system, bring the unauthorized out of the shadows and eliminate the unregulated shadow economy in which they -- and millions of others -- live and work.

See more stories tagged with: discrimination, immigration, latinos, splc, immi

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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