A recent Vanderbilt University study has found that in America, immigrants earn more when they have lighter skin. The study dissected a survey given to 2,084 legal U.S. immigrants and tried to find correlations between earnings and darkness. John Hersch, a law and economics professor who led the study said, “On average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education.” So is that to say a dark immigrant who graduates from a four-year university could just bleach their skin and earn the same amount of money upon graduation? Hersch claims to have controlled all other factors such as education, English-proficiency, occupation and racial self-esteem, or the immigrants’ concept of their race based on the racial beliefs in their home country. For example, a dark-skinned rosy-cheeked rural Chinese woman who immigrates to the U.S. (sadly hypothetical) may be psychologically affected by China’s cultural bias toward dark skin. It seems in America, like China or India, darkness is thought to skew employers’ ideas about a jobseeker’s abilities. One doctor who studies how skin color affects earning ability said that dark-skinned and medium-skinned blacks suffer a 10 to 15 percent discriminatory penalty relative to whites. And while I don’t doubt this, it didn’t seem to hurt Wesley Snipes or Jay-Z, respectively.
•AP: Skin Tone Affects Earnings