By Wynton Hall
Two members of the eight-person U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the independent bipartisan agency tasked with "objective and comprehensive investigation, research, and analysis" of civil rights issues, have warned President Barack Obama that granting illegal immigrants effective amnesty would “harm lower-skilled African-Americans by making it more difficult for them to obtain employment.”
In the five-page letter, Commissioner Peter Kirsanow and Vice Chair Abigail Thernstrom cite findings from several scholars demonstrating that illegal immigration disproportionately impacts the wage and employment outlook for African-American men.
Research from UC San Diego economics professor Gordon Hanson, for example, found that from 1960 to 2000, immigration was responsible for 40% of the 18% plunge in black employment rates. The letter also refers to a February 2012 Census Bureau report that found that “50.9% of native-born blacks had not continued their education beyond high school,” placing them in stiffer competition with illegal immigrants vying for low-skilled labor jobs.
Kirsanow and Thernstrom’s letter to Obama details the bleak economic plight African-Americans are presently experiencing:
The country’s economic woes have disproportionately harmed African-Americans, especially those with little education. In 2011 24.6 percent of African-Americans without a high school diploma were unemployed, as were 15.5 percent of African-Americans with only a high school diploma. Two and half years into the economic recovery, African-Americans face particular difficulty obtaining employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the seasonally adjusted January 2013 unemployment rate for all black Americans – not just those with few skills – was 13.8 percent, nearly twice the white unemployment rate of 7.0 percent. The economy has a glut of low-skilled workers, not a shortage.
The civil rights leaders end the letter by urging the president not
to exacerbate the economic struggles facing African-Americans by
granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.
“Not only do illegal immigrants compete for jobs with
African-Americans,” wrote Kirsanow and Thernstrom, “but that competition
drives down wages for the jobs that are available... We respectfully
submit that granting such legal status is not without substantial costs
to American workers.”
T. Willard Fair
From the testimony of T Willard Fair,
President and CEO, Urban League of Greater Miami; Center for
Immigration Studies Board Member, before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law Committee on the Judiciary - US House of Representatives:
Congressional Testimony: How Mass Immigration Hurts Black Americans
Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to address this panel.
I have devoted much of my adult life to one of the most important challenges facing our country:
"How to help young black men build
constructive lives as fathers and breadwinners. The size of the problem
was outlined in a recent book published by the National Urban League
entitled The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male --
black men are much more likely to be unemployed than white men, more
likely to be dropouts, in prison, in poverty, or dead."
There are many reasons for grim statistics like this, including the
continuing effects of slavery and Jim Crow; the shift in the economy
away from manufacturing; broken schools in our big cities; the
glorification of self-destructive behavior by popular culture.
But one factor is too often ignored -- mass immigration.
But one factor is too often ignored -- mass immigration.
There was little immigration when the struggle for civil rights began
to achieve success in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the 1965
immigration law that started today's mass immigration was itself seen as
a civil rights measure, intended to clean out rules that favored
immigrants from some countries over others. Sen. Edward Kennedy, then,
as now, chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee, said "The bill
will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not cause American
Workers to lose their jobs."
So much for predictions.
Since 1965, nearly 30 million legal immigrants have come here, plus
millions of illegal aliens. The results have been devastating for those
Americans -- black or white -- who compete for jobs with this immigrant
tide. George Borjas of Harvard has shown that immigration has cut the
wages of American men without a high school degree by $1,800 a year.
Economists at Northeastern University have found that businesses are
substituting immigrants for young American workers, especially for young
black men. In fact, scholars estimate that immigration is the reason
for one-third of the drop in employment among black men, and even some
of the increase in incarceration.
Of course, none of that means that individual immigrants -- or
particular immigrant groups -- can be blamed for the difficulties facing
black men. Being pro-Me should never make me anti-You. Nor can we use
immigration as a crutch, blaming it for all our problems. The reality is
that less-educated black men in America today have a variety of
problems -- high rates of crime and drug use, for example, and poor
performance at work and school -- that are caused by factors unrelated
to level of immigration.
But if cutting immigration and enforcing the law wouldn't be a cure-all, it sure would make my job easier. Take employment -- immigration isn't the whole reason for the drop in employment of black men; it's not even half the reason. But it is the largest single reason, and it's something we can fix relatively easily.
Think about it this way: If there's a young black man in Liberty
City, where I live, who's good with his hands and wants to become a
carpenter, which is more likely to help him achieve that goal -- amnesty
and more immigration, or enforcement and less immigration?
Which is more likely to help an ex-convict or recovering addict get
hired at an entry-level job and start the climb back to a decent life --
amnesty and more immigration, or enforcement and less immigration?
Which is more likely to persuade a teenager in the inner city to
reject the lure of gang life and instead stick with honest employment --
amnesty and more immigration, or enforcement and less immigration?
And it's not just a matter of jobs. Whatever your views on government
social programs, everyone can agree that resources are not infinite --
there's only so much social spending to go around. And since immigrants
have relatively low skills and low incomes, they use a lot of social
services and pay little in taxes, cutting into the spending on America's
own poor. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that illegal
aliens alone cost federal taxpayers $10 billion more a year in services
than they pay in taxes -- that's $10 billion that's not being spent on
disadvantaged Americans, not counting the much larger deficits at the
state and local level, where most social services are provided.
Likewise with the schools. This is an issue close to my heart, since I
co-founded Florida's first charter school and was recently confirmed as
chairman of the statewide Board of Education. We must offer the best
education possible to all our children, for their own good and for the
good of our country. But as budgets have tightened, school enrollment
has surged, and all of the growth in the nation's school-age population
-- 100 percent -- comes from immigrant families. This surge in enrolment
has led to school overcrowding and has diverted resources that would
otherwise have been devoted to at-risk students.
Solutions to the challenges facing black Americans have to come from
both private efforts and government initiative -- but regardless of the
specific approach, flooding the job market and overwhelming the public
schools and other government services undermines all our efforts.
"The interests of black Americans are clear: No amnesty, no guestworkers, enforce the immigration law."
From Inspector Vajayjay, Andrew Sullivan, January 2013:
Will Immigration Reform Hurt African-Americans?
Seeing Red AZ questions the Democratic coalition:
[W]hy would black American citizens, who have disproportionately high rates of unemployment both locally and nationally, be among those encouraging more illegals to be given legal status — allowing them to compete for jobs these citizens need and should have? … The Business Insider reported that while the overall employment rate remains weak, job reports show that minorities are still getting hit much harder by the job crisis — with African Americans suffering the highest unemployment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics show the unemployment rate for black Americans jumped to 14.0 percent last month, from 13.2 percent the previous month. Hispanic unemployment was unchanged at 11 percent,while 184,000 more black Americans went jobless.
Mark Krikorian recently made a similar point:
Mass immigration isn’t the only cause of the deep employment problems of less-skilled black workers. It’s not even the main cause. But it’s the easiest one to remedy.
Such conclusions are bolstered by a 2006 paper [pdf] by George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon Hanson for the National Bureau of Economic Research:
Using data drawn from the 1960-2000 U.S. Censuses, we find a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates. As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose. Our analysis suggests that a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by almost a full percentage point.
A reader chimes in:
Regardless of how illegal immigration may help the 1% and even the 20%, you better hope the research on this is wrong, else we’re potentially setting up the irony of the first African-American president passing the single most harmful piece of legislation to African-Americans in 25 years.
From The Root in 2010 by Cord Jefferson...
How Illegal Immigration Hurts Black America
With national unemployment hovering around 10
percent and black male unemployment at a staggering 17.6 percent, it's
just not true that undocumented workers are doing the jobs that we won't
do.
In October 2008, amidst claims that one of its
subsidiaries was knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, North Carolina
poultry producer House of Raeford Farms initiated a systematic
conversion of its workforce.
Following a U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement raid that nabbed 300 undocumented workers at a Columbia
Farms processing plant in Columbia, S.C., a spooked House of Raeford
quietly began replacing immigrants with native-born labor at all of its
plants. Less than a year later, House of Raeford’s flagship production
line in Raeford, N.C., had been transformed, going from more than 80
percent Latino to 70 percent African-American, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.
Under President George W. Bush, showy workplace
raids like the one that befell Raeford were standard—if widely
despised—fare. And though the Obama administration has committed itself
to dialing down the practice, Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano has occasionally found herself the bearer of bad news to immigration activists who expected the raids to end entirely under her watch.
For the most part, the workplace crackdowns themselves are unremarkable—gaudy, ad hoc things
that mitigate America’s immigration problem the way a water balloon
might a forest fire. Increasingly however, their immediate aftermaths—in
which dozens of eager African-American job applicants line up to fill
vacancies—call into question a familiar refrain from the nation’s more
vocal immigration proponents: Illegal immigrants do work American
citizens won’t. Even former Mexican President Vicente Fox fell victim to
the hype, infamously declaring in 2006 that Mexican immigrants perform
the jobs that “not even blacks want to do.”
Four years later, with national unemployment hovering around 10 percent and black male unemployment at a staggering 17.6 percent,
it seems even less likely that immigrants are filling only those jobs
that Americans won’t deign to do. Just ask Delonta Spriggs, a
24-year-old black man profiled in a November Washington Post piece on joblessness, who pleaded, “Give me a chance to show that I can work. Just give me a chance.”
Spriggs has a difficult road ahead. In this
recessed United States, competition for all work is dog-eat-dog. But
that holds especially true for low-skilled jobs, jobs for which high
school dropouts (like Spriggs) and reformed criminals (also like
Spriggs) must now vie against nearly 12 million illegal immigrants,
80 percent of whom are from Latin America. What's more, it seems that,
in many cases, the immigrants are winning. From 2007 to 2008, though
Latino immigrants reported significant job losses, black unemployment,
the worst in the nation, remained 3.5 points higher.
“I don't believe there are any jobs that Americans
won't take, and that includes agricultural jobs,” says Carol Swain,
professor of law at Vanderbilt University and author of Debating Immigration.
“[Illegal immigration] hurts low-skilled, low-wage workers of all
races, but blacks are harmed the most because they're disproportionately
low-skilled.”
Despite President Fox’s assertion, of the Pew
Hispanic Center’s top six occupational sectors for undocumented
immigrants (farming, maintenance, construction, food service, production
and material moving), all six employed hundreds of thousands
of blacks in 2008. That year, almost 15 percent of meat-processing
workers were black, as were more than 18 percent of janitors. And
although blacks on the whole aren’t involved in agriculture at anywhere
near the rates of illegal immigrants—a quarter of whom work in
farming—about 14 percent of fruit and vegetable sorters are
African-American.
For their efforts, African Americans were paid a median household income of $32,000 in 2007. In the same year, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $37,000.
Audrey Singer is a senior fellow specializing in
race and immigration at the Brookings Institution. She agrees that
blacks are disproportionately hindered by illegal immigration, but says
that pay is a necessary variable to note when talking about work
Americans will and won’t do. “There is evidence that shows people at the
lower end of the skill spectrum are most affected by immigrant labor,
particularly illegal immigrant labor,” she says. “But would Americans do
the jobs illegal workers do at the wages that they’re paid? I don’t
think so.”
Besides competing for work while simultaneously
attempting to avoid drastically deflated paychecks and benefits,
unemployed African- American job seekers must also frequently combat
racial discrimination. In a 2006 research paper called “Discrimination
in Low-Wage Labor Markets,” a team of Princeton sociologists discovered
that, all else being equal, black applicants to low-wage jobs were 10
percent less likely than Latinos to receive positive responses from
potential employers. Furthermore, employers were twice as likely to
prefer white applicants to equally qualified blacks.
"To be blunt, a lot of employers would rather not
deal with black American workers if they have the option of hiring a
docile Hispanic immigrant instead,” says Mark Krikorian, executive
director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Krikorian’s organization
advocates a large-scale contraction of immigration to America, one of
the main reasons being that low-skilled immigrants aren’t contributing
to the U.S. labor force in a way that American citizens can’t.
Nevertheless, Krikorian says that easily exploitable immigrants remain
attractive to businesses looking to eliminate hassles. “[Illegal
immigrants] are not going to demand better wages, and they're not going
to ask for time off,” he adds. “And frankly, a lot of bosses are
thinking, 'I don't want to deal with a young black male.'"
Most political analysts expect the debate over
immigration reform to find new life in 2010, under a president who
thoughtfully supports both increased border enforcement and the
“recognition of immigrants’ humanity.” Wherever the discussion meanders,
however—from amnesty on the left to expulsion on the right—from here
on, it seems that anyone interested in speaking thoroughly on the matter
can no longer do so without discussing its impact on black America.
This type of discussion has proved difficult in the
past, however. “Many of the black scholars dance around this hard
issue,” says Swain. “They do their research in such a way that it
doesn’t address how immigration affects blacks. There’s a lot of
pressure to say the politically correct thing—that immigrants aren’t
hurting African Americans. Well, that’s not true.”
Cord Jefferson is a regular contributor to The Root.
Related Reading
Will Aging Childless Voters Enslave My Future Grandchildren?
The 1965 Immigration Reform and The New York Times: Context, Coverage and Long-Term Consequences
Economic Micawberism: The Left Expects Businesses To Place Progressive Ideals Above Economic Survival
The Surrealistic States of America
After Arizona: The Field, Still Unoccupied
Immigration Reform: If the Past Is Prologue...
Yes, Immigration Can Bring Huge Benefits, But On This Scale And At This Speed, It's Too Much To Cope With
Adios, Adios, Miss American Pie? Not Necessarily.
Immigration & The Town That Stopped Mincing Words
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Civil Rights Commission: "Granting Illegal Immigrants Effective Amnesty Would 'Harm Lower-Skilled, African-American"Yes, Immigration Can Bring Huge Benefits, But On This Scale And At This Speed, It's Too Much To Cope With
Adios, Adios, Miss American Pie? Not Necessarily.
Immigration & The Town That Stopped Mincing Words
A Fair Warning To Those Promoting Open Borders, Amnesty, & Free Immigration
Will Aging Childless Voters Enslave My Future Grandchildren?
The 1965 Immigration Reform and The New York Times: Context, Coverage and Long-Term Consequences
Economic Micawberism: The Left Expects Businesses To Place Progressive Ideals Above Economic Survival
The Surrealistic States of America
After Arizona: The Field, Still Unoccupied
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