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.