Illegal Immigration: The Impact on Wages and Employment of Black Workers: by Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.

U.S. Civil Rights Commission
April 4, 2008
Washington, DC

Illegal Immigration: The Impact on Wages and Employment of Black Workers

Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.
Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics
Cornell University

Overall Perspective

Before addressing the specific issue of illegal immigration and its economic effects on black Americans, the broad subject needs to be placed in perspective. No issue has affected the economic well-being of African Americans more that the phenomenon of immigration and its related policy manifestations. Immigration defined the entry experience of the ancestors of most the nation’s contemporary black American community (as slaves who were brought as involuntary immigrants); it placed them disproportionately in the states that today comprise the “Southâ€