Prejudice, Discrimination, and the Labor Market: Attainments of Immigrants in Australia

This article develops hypotheses about how prejudice can be expected to affect discrimination and tests them in Australia, a nation with numerous and diverse immigrants. Census data, analyzed with a flexible regression model, are from the 1981 1% Public Use Sample (PUS), with detailed information on education, occupation, income, timing of immigration, and language fluency. Attitudinal data, analyzed with LISREL methods, are from a representative national sample (N = 3,012). The analyses show that the sociological hypothesis of prejudice leading to discrimination is both wrong (there is little or no discrimination in jobs and pay) and right (prejudiced employers say they would discriminate in hiring). Economists employers, too,are partly wrong (competition does not force employers to renounce discriminatory hiring) and partly right(minorities receive equal rewards to education with no sign of discrimination on a social distance gradient). The authors suggest that "exclusionary" and "economic" discrimination are fundamentally distinct and that, unless exclusionary discrimination is nearly universal, it does not imply economic discrimination.