Thread: NC: Blacks, Latinos discuss unity - Immigration hot topic

Blacks, Latinos discuss unity
Immigration hot topic at conference

Stanley B. Chambers Jr., Staff Writer
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/668018.html

DURHAM - African-Americans and Latinos in Durham live mostly in separate worlds and have different ideas about immigration.
Bridging that gap was the aim of the Durham Human Relations Unity Conference at the Hayti Heritage Center on Saturday. The event drew more than 70 people, a mix of Durham residents and representatives of anti-racism groups.

Relations between Durham's blacks and Latinos are important because they are the city's dominant minority groups. Blacks make up 40 percent of city residents while Hispanics represent 13 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Both often live side-by-side in the city's poorest sections. In 2003, the city passed a resolution supporting human rights regardless of immigration status.

But some believe Latinos have gained opportunities and power more quickly than blacks, creating tensions between the two groups.

"It's hard when you see another community come in and get so much more opportunity," said Chauncey Taylor, 26, of Durham, referring to jobs and business ownership. "It's hard for us to move past that."

Many at the conference agreed that black-Latino relations in Durham need improvement and that the two groups don't understand one another's language and culture. Late last year, several Hispanic robbery victims reported that their assailants were black. And a Duke University study released last year said that more than half of Latino immigrants thought most blacks are not hard workers and could not be trusted.

"Because of immigration, there are some strained relations because it wasn't all of a sudden [that immigrants came to the U.S.], but sometimes it feels that way," said Rita Gonzalez-Jackson, 50, of Durham. She also believes misconceptions contribute to the problem. "And that's affecting people and their perceptions. If you don't have commonalities, all you're going to focus on is the differences."

Saturday's conference, a partnership between the city's Department of Human Relations and the Southern Anti-Racism Network, aimed to foster a discussion about immigration while showing that blacks and Latinos share similarities.

"If we talk to each other, we would see that we have the same struggle," said Theresa El-Amin, director of the anti-racism network. "Your struggle is my struggle. My struggle is your struggle. Let's work together."

But working together requires difficult conversations exposing personal beliefs.

That was evident when about 20 people gathered in a circle at the conference's immigration workshop.

Delores Eaton, 77, who is black, spoke of seeing Latino businesses while driving around Durham.

"I see that not only you're acquiring political power, you're also acquiring economic power," Eaton said.

But Bryan Parras, regional organizer for the Houston-based Southern Human Rights Organizer's Network, said people should focus on the similarities and common goals of the two groups.

"We need to get past and beyond that because we all had it bad," Parras said. "We've got to get past these small, minor details."

The immigration workshop group came up with a few suggestions to foster better relations between blacks and Latinos, including better communication, working together more and learning about each other's cultures.

Achieving unity will take equal effort from both sides, said Richard G. Womack, the AFL-CIO's assistant to the president.

"Unity is a two-way street," Womack said. "We have to champion each other's causes. We cannot sit by and watch injustice and say nothing."

Staff writer Stanley B. Chambers Jr. can be reached at 956-2426 or stan.chambers@newsobserver.com.

ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES FOR BLACKS
As it happens, the United States contains one particular group that is clearly vulnerable to competition from immigration: American blacks.
This question has attracted attention for years. In New York City in the 1830s, before mass immigration began, most domestic servants were black; twenty years later, they were Irish.16 Later, and more dramatically, immigration from Europe after the Civil War is often said to have fatally retarded the economic integration of the freed slaves. For example, blacks were apparently crowded out of skilled jobs they had been working their way into both in central Pennsylvania steel mills and in northern Michigan logging and lumber mills.17
Prominent black leaders certainly saw immigration this way.
"Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room perhaps for some newly arrived emigrants, whose hunger and color are thought to give them a title to especial favor," said Frederick Douglass, escaped slave and abolitionist orator.18
"To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, I would repeat what I say to my own race, Cast down your bucket where you are," the founder of the all-black Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, powerfully urged in his famous speech at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. "Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes," he continued, in a pointed reference to immigrants' radical political habits,

. . . who have, without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests... nurs[ed] your children, watch[ed] by the sick-beds of your mothers and fathers, and often follow[ed] them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves.19

In later years, Washington's argument that acquiring basic skills was more important for blacks than contesting segregation was remembered and often reviled. His complementary plea that they be protected from immigrant competition was forgotten, as the First Great Wave surged to its crest.

More recently, no less an authority than Simon Kuznets endorsed this analysis of immigration's impact. He felt that the Second Great Immigration Lull after the 1920s enabled Southern blacks to begin their historic migration to the cities and the economic opportunities of the North.20
How can this happen if immigrants make more jobs than they take? Because of important qualifications that immigration enthusiasts often miss—native-born workers are not necessarily displaced in aggregate.
Julian Simon, to his credit, does not miss these qualifications. In The Economic Consequences of Immigration, he frankly and repeatedly acknowledges that "[a]ny labor-force change causes some groups to suffer some harm in the short run ... It is true that some particular groups may be injured by a particular group of immigrants.. ."21 (my italics).
Naturally, if you are in the particular group displaced, knowing that the economy is benefiting overall may not be much consolation. (This effect works in reverse too. Agribusiness lobbies for cheap immigrant labor rather than mechanize itself, regardless of the overall cost to the economy. Ironically, agribusiness is often itself an unnatural bloom—subsidized by federal water projects.)
In Friends or Strangers, George Borjas found that blacks living in areas of immigrant concentration did not seem to have suffered significantly reduced incomes compared with those living elsewhere.
The reason, he theorized, is that during the years in question—the 1970s—the effect of immigration was overwhelmed by the effects of baby boomers and women entering the labor market. Now, of course, these factors no longer apply.
But studies of specific high-immigrant areas may fail to capture a tendency for native-born workers to be repelled from them because of the increased competition. Across the entire country in the 1980s, the wages of native high school dropouts fell by 10 percent relative to the wages of more educated workers. Borjas has more recently calculated that about a third of that decline is due to immigration.22
Since the Great Society reforms, a significant part of the black community has succumbed to social pathology. As Andrew Hacker put it in his 1992 bestseller, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,

. . . fewer blacks now have steady jobs of any kind and their unemployment rates have been growing progressively worse relative to those recorded for whites.23

There is at least a possibility that this is related to the simultaneous opening of the immigration floodgates. Which is why it is to current policy, and not to critics of immigration, that the charge of "racism" might best be applied.

Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation, HarperPerennial, HarperCollins, New York, 1996, pp. 173-175