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There has been an increasing number of allegations of discrimination toward US employees and anecdotal indications of immigrant employee exploitation in the information technology sector. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if applicants’ work visa status causes native-born applicants to be treated differentially (less favorably) than foreign-born applicants.

A correspondence study design is used to observe differential screening processes by measuring the frequency of favorable job application responses received by foreign-born applicants compared to equally skilled native-born applicants.

Results from the study suggest that fictitious Asian foreign-born applicants who demonstrate the need for H-1B work visa sponsorship for employment receive significantly more favorable e-mail responses to job ads than US native-born applicants. Moreover, white native-born applicants are approximately 23 percent less likely than Asian foreign-born applicants to receive a request for an interview.

Because of the chosen method, the research results may lack generalizability. The hypotheses should be tested further by targeting more geographical locations, a variety of industries and using qualitative methods in future research.

The paper includes implications for hiring managers who wish to reduce their liability for employment discrimination and foreign-born job seekers wishing to manage their expectations of the recruitment process.

This paper fulfills an identified need to empirically study how the work visa status of job seekers affects early recruitment as increasingly more anecdotal evidence of immigrant exploitation and discrimination in the technology sector is reported.

Few studies examine how hiring discrimination can be an antecedent to the labor exploitation of immigrant workers. The main purpose of this paper is to advance the theoretical understanding of how the intersectionality of race and immigrant status affects differential hiring treatment, and how it affects job offers, job acceptance and hiring decision outcomes for immigrant job seekers.

The paper draws from theories on status and intersectionality, and literature on immigration labor and racial hierarchy, addressing the unequal power relations that underlie race and immigration status affecting the hiring process, to advance critical understandings of why immigrant job seekers accept positions where they may be exploited.

This paper provides a conceptual model to critically synthesize the complexity between race and immigrant status, and their effect on the experience of immigrant job seekers differently. Exploitation opportunism is introduced to better understand the mechanisms of hiring discrimination among immigrant job seekers to include the role of race, immigrant status, economic motivations and unequal power relations on the hiring process.

The framework for exploitation opportunism will help employers improve the quality and fairness of their hiring methods, and empower immigrant job seekers to not allow themselves to accept subpar job offers which can lead to exploitation.

The paper provides an original analysis of immigrant job seekers' experience of the hiring process that reveals the intragroup differences among immigrants based on race and status, and the decision-making mechanisms that hiring managers and immigrant job seekers use to evaluate job offers and job acceptance.