Thread: Blacks sour on illegal immigrants

I don't have the URL, but this came from the Chicago Tribune. Could also be at blacknews.com.

Blacks sour on illegal immigrants

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a columnist for blacknews.com, an author and political analyst
Published February 6, 2006


Near the close of a recent spirited community forum in south Los Angeles on black and Latino relations, a young black man in the audience stood up and proudly, even defiantly, shouted that he was a member of the Minuteman Project. This is the fringe group that has waged a noisy, gun-toting, headline-grabbing campaign to shut down the U.S. border to illegal immigrants. GOP conservatives and immigration reformers denounce the group's borderline racist rants.

The rhetoric of the anti-immigration group didn't seem to faze the young man or many of the other black people in the audience who nodded in agreement as he launched into a finger-pointing tirade against illegal immigrants who he claimed stole jobs from black workers. He punctuated his harangue by loudly announcing that he had taken part in a Minuteman border patrol back in April.

Illegal immigration clearly touched a raw nerve with many blacks in the audience. Nationally, many! blacks are unabashed in fingering illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans--even though many illegal immigrants in the U.S. are from Canada, Europe and Asia--for the poverty and job dislocation in black communities. Illegal immigration has touched a national nerve. More than half of Americans, according to a Pew Research Center survey in November 2005, believe that illegal immigration should be a top national policy priority.

The first big warning sign of black frustration with illegal immigration came during the battle over Proposition 187 in California in 1994. Whites voted by big margins for the measure that denied public social services to undocumented immigrants. But nearly 50 percent of blacks also backed the measure. Republican Gov. Pete Wilson shamelessly pandered to anti-immigrant hysteria and rode it to a re-election victory.

Wilson got nearly 20 percent of the black vote during that election, double what Republicans in California typically get from blacks. Wils! on almo st certainly bumped up his black vote total with his freewheeling assault on illegal immigration. Blacks have also given substantial support to anti-bilingual ballot measures in California.

Though there is furious dispute over the economic impact that the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. have on the job market, there is no concrete evidence that the majority of employers hire Latinos for low-end jobs and exclude blacks from them solely because of their race. The sea of state and federal anti-discrimination laws and federal labor code sections explicitly bar employment discrimination. Despite a recent flurry of lawsuits and settlements by blacks against and with major employers for alleged racial favoritism toward Hispanic workers, employers vehemently deny that they shun blacks. The employers maintain that blacks simply don't apply for these jobs.

These aren't just flimsy covers for discrimination. Many blacks will no longer work the low-skil! led, me nial factory, restaurant and custodial jobs that in decades past they filled. The pay is too low, the work too hard and the indignities too great. On the other hand, those blacks who seek these jobs are often given a quick brushoff by employers. The subtle message is that blacks won't be hired, even if they do apply. An entire category of jobs at the bottom rung of American industry has been clearly marked "Latino only." That deepens suspicion and resentment among blacks that illegal immigration is to blame for the economic misery of poor blacks.

The anti-immigrant sentiment among blacks is not new. A century ago, immigration was also a hot-button issue among black leaders. Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois railed against Eastern European immigrants who crowded Northern cities. They claimed the new immigrants elbowed blacks out of bottom-rung manufacturing jobs. At times, these leaders, otherwise progressive and staunch fighters for civil rights, s! ounded every bit as hard-line as the most rabid, nativist, America-first, anti-immigration foes in demanding that the federal government clamp down on legal and illegal immigration.

Illegal immigration, then and now, is not the prime reason why so many poor young blacks are on the streets and why some turn to gangs, guns and drugs to get ahead. A shrinking manufacturing economy, savage state and federal government cuts in and the elimination of job- and skills-training programs, failing public schools, a soaring black prison population and employment discrimination still are the major reasons for the grim employment prospects and poverty in inner-city black neighborhoods.

Civil rights leaders and the Congressional Black Caucus have repeatedly condemned the thinly disguised race-tinged appeals of the Minuteman Project, Save Our State and the legions of other fringe anti-immigration groups that have cropped up in nearly every part of the country in recent years. Some of! them o penly pitch their anti-immigrant line to blacks. As the immigration debate heats up nationwide, and with so many young blacks unemployed and with a prison cell staring them in the face, more blacks may find it harder to resist the temptation to join in their shout to close down the border.

Who is this idiot?

Anxiously waiting for part 3, 4, 5, and 6.

http://www.blacknews.com/pr/immigrants201.html

Why So Many Blacks Fear Illegal Immigrants - Pt. 2

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com Columnist



A few months before the 2004 presidential election, Project 21, a Washington D.C. based group of black conservative business and professionals, called George Bush on the carpet for his conflicted immigration reform proposals. The group railed that if Congress enacted Bush's reform proposals it would flood the country with hordes of illegal immigrants, speed the deterioration in public education, further bulge the prisons, and undercut American worker's wages. But Project 21's biggest fear was that illegal immigration would have dire impact on black workers. It claimed that illegal immigrants depress wages, elbow blacks out of low and unskilled farm and manufacturing jobs, and snatch vital services from the black poor.

This is the worn argument of conservatives, and fringe anti-immigrant groups such as the Minuteman Project. Other studies show that illegal immigrants pay more taxes, spend more consumer dollars on goods and services, and receive less in benefits from government agencies than any other group. Project 21's leap on the anti-illegal immigration bandwagon was predictable. They are following the lead of their ultra-conservative GOP boosters that have pounded on Bush to take even harsher steps to shut down the border.

But the illegal immigration debate is not a manufactured ploy by conservatives to exploit black fears over illegal immigrants. In the days immediately following the Katrina debacle, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a centrist Democrat, touched off a mild flap with his shoot-from-the lip quip to local business leaders that he was appalled at the thought that Mexican workers seeking to fill reconstruction jobs would overrun New Orleans. The crack was silly, impolitic and crude, but civil rights leaders were mostly mute on it and him.

That's no surprise either. During the past two decades, the illegal immigration debate has stirred doubt, hesitation, and even conflicting positions by black liberals and Democrats. In the 1980s, the Congressional Black Caucus staunchly opposed the 1984 immigration reform bill. The bill called for tougher sanctions against employers that hired illegal immigrants and for tighter enforcement controls at the border, and an English language requirement to attain legalization. But that was an easy call then for the Caucus. Those were the Reagan years, and black Democrats and civil rights leaders waged relentless war against Reagan's domestic policies. In 1985, and 1990, the Caucus opposed other reform measures that were pretty much a carbon copy of the earlier proposal.

The CBC took its cue from the Hispanic Caucus and continued to oppose tougher punitive measure immigration. But the sharp jump in the number of illegal immigrants, new polls that showed that a significant numbers of blacks opposed increased immigration, bi-lingual education, and drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, and the rumbles from their constituents that illegal immigrants were grabbing jobs from blacks especially in retail and construction industries, made some black Democrats pause. While they and the NAACP and the Urban League still strongly oppose the shrill, nativist, borderline racist calls by fringe immigration groups to deport all illegal immigrants, they cautiously demand measures to better control immigration. In 2003, the SCLC, Rainbow Push and other civil rights groups backed the freedom ride bus campaign to lobby Congress for amnesty for illegal immigrants and stronger labor protections. The NAACP and Urban League, though, took no official position on the Freedom Ride.

A year before the freedom ride, the NAACP Hector Flores, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, to be a featured speaker at its convention. Flores and the NAACP mostly skirted the issue of immigration. It was only one of several policy initiatives that included affirmative action, tougher hate crimes legislation, health care, elimination of racial profiling, voting rights, and greater public education funding that the two groups agreed to work more closely together on. The NAACP did not say what or how it would work with LULAC on immigration reform, nor did it spell out its own position on the issue.

This is not a total retreat by some civil rights leaders and black Democrats on immigrant rights. In 2004, the majority of Congressional Black Caucus members backed an amnesty measure that was for more liberal and generous in granting amnesty than the one offered by the Bush administration. But some civil rights leaders still warned that illegal immigration threatened black job gains in some parts of the country, and that some blacks had begun to parrot the same racially charged arguments of groups such as the Minuteman Project.

The illegal immigration controversy is not going away. Civil rights leaders and black Democrats must and should not pander to the anti-immigrant hysteria that has gripped many Americans, and that includes many blacks. They must continue to call for a fair, equitable immigration reform measure that both safeguard the rights and labor protections of undocumented workers and the job security of black workers. That's a tall order, but it's one they must fill.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, an author and political analyst.

For media interviews, contact:
Mr. Hutchinson at 323-296-6331 or hutchinsonreport@aol.com