Even if the effect described in the article is not conscious ("let me pay this person less, since he's a foreigner[0]"), I have no trouble seeing how it could happen (unconsciously), based on my own personal experiences.
My first name is very difficult for Americans to pronounce because (A) it is not phonetic; and (B) even a phonetic spelling would include sounds not common in English.
My last name is actually an Anglicisation of the original family name, so it's entirely phonetic. Even still people have trouble saying it. That one confuses me to this day.
The impact on my life of having a tough-to-pronounce name is usually subtle, but it's noticeable in minor ways. I can imagine that these would add up in the long run (perhaps not for every individual, but in the aggregate).
[0] That said, let's not discount the impact of being able to identify a person's race by his/her name (the original Freakonomics book goes into this a lot). I have a friend who has a very obviously Chinese name, and he started putting "US Citizen" at the top of his resume, because so many people thought that he needed visa sponsorship, even though he was born in the US.
Another friend of mine is white, but his surname also happens to be very common for Koreans. He's had a few funny interactions where he walked into an interview and the person was momentarily surprised to see a blonde, white man instead of an Asian interviewee.