Latin American immigrants are less likely to be authorized to work in the U.S. than similar immigrants from other countries.

Employment based visa programs offer a way for hundreds of thousands of foreign individuals to work in the U.S. every year. But is there any bias in who gets approved and who does not? In new research that examines nearly 200,000 labor certification applications, Ben A. Rissing and Emilio J. Castilla find that foreign workers from Latin America are 23 percent less likely than Canadians to be certified to work in the U.S., and that Asians are 13 percent more likely to be approved than Canadians. This said, they find no statistically significant differences in approval outcomes by immigrant world region during government evaluations of audited applications – which are reached using detailed employment-relevant information. To address unequal outcomes in these assessments, Rissing and Castilla suggest that the foreign worker citizenship field within the labor certification application be removed during government evaluations.