Joni Hersch, a Professor of Law and Economics at Vanderbilt University, has researched the relationship between physical characteristics of legal immigrants, such as their skin color and their height, and their economic outcomes. She has found that skin color is related to wages: immigrants with a lighter skin color earn higher wages than immigrants with a darker skin color, regardless of other characteristics such as their country of origin and their education. She suggests that this is caused by discrimination arising from the biases that influence employers' decisions within the US labor market.
Her publications on that topic can be found here:
http://law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/faculty-personal-sites/joni-hersch/publications/index.aspx
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