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Mass Immigration Takes Greatest Toll on African-Americans - The official U.S. unemployment rate crept up to more than 6 percent last month, but for African-Americans the jobless rate leapt from 9.8 percent in October to 11 percent in November. One would expect that the logical response to this sort of crisis from the Administration and Congress, and especially from people who purport to represent the interests of African-Americans, would be an urgent effort to create new jobs. Instead, President Bush, congressional leaders of both parties, and the black leadership are pressing ahead with efforts to import more foreign workers. Even as unemployment has been creeping upwards for the general population and topping double digits for African-Americans, the United States has maintained a policy of importing hundreds of thousands of new workers each year. Since the current recession began in 2000, some 3 million new legal and illegal immigrants have settled in the United States. While white- and blue-collar workers have been losing jobs, we not only continue to bring immigrants, but we also admit additional hundreds of thousands of “temporary” guest workers to fill both skilled and unskilled jobs. Competition from immigrants and years of guest worker programs has taken its toll on the American work force. One does not need to be an economist or sociologist to observe the transformation that has occurred in many sectors of the American labor market over the past decade or so. In some areas of the country, entire sectors of the labor market have been taken over almost entirely by immigrant workers. Go to just about any construction site, hotel, or manufacturing plant in many parts of the country and it is evident that immigration has had a major impact on the labor market. In some cases the influx of immigrants has allowed native-born workers to move up the ladder. But in all too many other instances, mass immigration has moved American workers off the ladder entirely, particularly black Americans. According to a report by the National Academy of Sciences done during the economic boom of the late-1990s, the dramatic rise in immigration was a direct cause of dramatic declines in jobs and income for Americans with a high school education or less. If one tracks the economic progress of African-Americans, or the lack of it, over the past century there is an unmistakable correlation with patterns of immigration. Blacks have made the greatest economic advances during periods of low immigration, while economic conditions have stagnated or regressed during period of high immigration. The initial migration of blacks from the South to the industrialized cities of the North in the late-19th and early-20th centuries was thwarted by massive immigration from Europe. This was a phenomenon that was not lost on black leaders of the time who implored the captains of American industry at the time to make use of America’s black labor force. As immigration slowed around 1920, the movement of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North gained momentum and the nucleus of a black middle class was formed. During the labor crunch caused by World War II and the postwar recovery of the 1950s and 1960s, when immigration was about one-fifth of its current levels, black Americans made enormous economic and social advances. The loss of many unionized industrial jobs, combined with a resurgence of mass immigration over the past 25 years, has halted that progress. Employment opportunities that have served as a portal to the middle class and by necessity must remain in this country, like construction and service sector jobs, have increasingly been taken over by immigrant workers. Unlike earlier generations of black leaders who argued vociferously that the interests of American citizens should take precedence over the desires of immigrants and the agenda of employers, today’s African-American leaders have been at the forefront of efforts to tear down borders. Rather than a labor and economic issue, present day black leaders have come to view immigration as a civil rights issue and an opportunity to build political coalitions. In doing so, they seem willing to sacrifice the interests of millions of African-Americans (and other Americans as well) whose jobs, incomes, educational opportunities and access to social services are compromised by the more than one million new immigrants each year. As unemployment rises and governments at all levels struggle to cope with renewed budget deficits, the most constructive thing that our political leaders can do is to stop flooding the labor market with perhaps a million new permanent and temporary workers each year. Slowing the flow of immigration would offer a welcome respite to Americans of all racial and ethnic groups, but no group would benefit more than African-Americans. |
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