Anti-Asian rhetoric during the pandemic negatively impacted employment and earnings, new research finds

A first-of-its-kind study, led by a Northeastern University researcher, examined how racial bias and political rhetoric against Asians and other underrepresented groups in the United States impacted their employment status in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study, "Public opinion, racial bias and labour market outcomes in the U.S.," published June 17 in Nature Human Behaviour, found that from April 2020 to May 2021 the unemployment rate of Asians surpassed that of whites in the U.S. for the first time in modern history.

The study, co-authored by Silvia Prina, associate professor of economics at Northeastern, found that all underrepresented groups—but most notably Asians—performed poorly in the post-pandemic job market compared to white employees.

The study found that Asians were more likely to be unemployed—by a statistically significant 7%—in jobs that required face-to-face interaction.

The study also found that, if still employed, Asians saw a drop in their weekly earnings by an average of 8%.

Consistent with a role for public opinion affecting labor market outcomes, the research finds that the effects are larger in magnitude in strongly Republican states, where anti-Asian rhetoric might have had more influence.

In addition, while widespread along the political spectrum, negative shifts in views of Asians were much stronger among those who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 and those who report watching Fox News.

Overall, the study suggests that anti-Chinese political rhetoric by politicians and the media is likely to have played a role.

"We knew that there was discrimination against this group of people because we saw news reports of people being attacked," Prina says. "We didn't know that there were implications that went beyond the acts of verbal or physical violence."

Using nationally representative data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the primary source of official U.S. labor market statistics, the researchers found that Asians who worked in occupations with a higher likelihood of face-to-face interactions were more likely to become unemployed with the onset of the pandemic.

At the same time, Anti-Asian hate crimes in large U.S. cities increased by more than 180% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

In fact, one in five Asians in the U.S., or about 4.8 million people, experienced a hate incident in the first year of the pandemic, according to a report from Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition dedicated to ending discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

"The anti-Chinese rhetoric by Donald Trump and the right-wing media is likely to have played an important role in people's perception of Asian people and their willingness to interact with them as workers," according to the research.