Penalty of Prejudice or Premium of Privilege? European Immigrant Groups in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Ethnic stratification theory and research advance two propositions: (1) The socioeconomic attainment of minority groups is reduced by majority-group prejudice; and (2) The socioeconomic attainment of the majority group, and of related groups, is increased by the cultural transmission of favorable attitudes toward such groups. Applying these propositions, the present study conducts a path analysis to examine relationships among European immigrant groups’ respective national origins, home values (from the 1930 Census), and U.S. natives’ social distance attitudes toward the groups (from Bogardus’s 1926 survey). Estimates show that Russian Jews’ median home value is reduced by seven-tenths of a standard deviation by natives’ desires to avoid Jews, whereas Northern and Western European groups’ median home values are increased by about one standard deviation by natives’ willingness to associate with these groups’ members. It follows that a penalty of prejudice (that is, a reduction in socioeconomic attainment because of unfavorable social distance scores) for minorities and a premium of privilege (that is, an improvement in socioeconomic attainment because of favorable social distance scores) for majority-related groups are complementary effects of social distance attitudes.