Does College Prestige Matter? Asian CEOs and High-Skilled Immigrant Hiring in the US

Abstract

In the hiring discrimination literature, employers are depicted primarily as majority members who strive to bolster their privileged group status by limiting immigrants’ employment opportunities. While minority employers are expected to be less discriminatory towards immigrant hiring than their majority counterparts, our argument contradicts this expectation. Building on the segmented assimilation and social identity literature, we analyse the disparities in organisational support for high-skilled immigrant hiring among Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 1500 firms (2009–2018) with a focus on organisations led by Asian CEOs. We find that firms with Asian CEOs tend to have a lower intent to hire high-skilled foreign workers compared to those with CEOs of other races, but such a negative effect improves significantly when the Asian CEOs received a prestigious college education. This article extends theoretical discussion on hiring discrimination by emphasising the importance of CEO minority status and education.