Immigration Article of the Day: No Country for Model Minorities: Evidence of Discrimination Against Asians and Noncitizen Immigrants in the U.S. Nursing Home Market  by Chengxin Xu and Danbee Lee

Abstract

Previous literature related to discrimination against minority group members at the frontline of public service organizations gives limited attention to Asians. Meanwhile, previous research also assumes service recipients are citizens of the focal country, ignoring how noncitizen immigrants, who are equally eligible for the public services, are treated. To fill this gap, we rely on the models of discriminative behavior of frontline workers, including taste-based and statistical discrimination, to examine the potential unequal treatment between 1) Asians vs. Whites and 2) noncitizens vs. citizens. To test our hypotheses, we ran a corresponding field experiment in the U.S. nursing home market (N=6,428). Our findings identify substantial discrimination against Asians and noncitizen immigrants. On average, nursing homes in the U.S. are less responsive to and less likely to offer services to Asians and noncitizen immigrants, compared to Whites and citizens, respectively. In particular, by estimation, an Asian noncitizen immigrant may need to spend twice as much effort as a white U.S. citizen to get a response from a nursing home. Such discrimination is observed in all public, private for-profit, and nonprofit nursing homes, whereas private for-profit nursing homes demonstrated less discrimination. This study has implications for describing frontline discrimination in government regulated public service organizations and for scholarly understanding of the mechanism of such discrimination.

KJ