June 28, 2007

African Americans, and others, should beware of immigrant bashing

With the United States at war in the Middle East, journalists often tell us what is being said on "the Arab street." Well, on America's black street, debates over immigration reform are percolating.

Surveys say that African Americans overwhelmingly see immigration reform as a moral and civil rights issue. But others, especially low-wage workers, fear that legalizing 12 million undocumented workers will add to their misery.

Such barbershop talk found its way into the mainstream media earlier this month when T. Willard Fair, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Urban League, testified in Washington that newly arrived immigrants are taking jobs that low-wage African Americans otherwise would have.

Though Fair is hardly the only African American who feels this way, his congressional testimony suddenly made him the black face of a largely white anti-immigrant movement that includes as controversial a group as the Minutemen.

An outfit like the Minutemen, syndicated columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson noted, has few visible black supporters, but still chose to kick off its 13-city caravan against immigration from a park in a predominately black section of Los Angeles.

Hutchinson said it was "a shrewd, cynical ploy to capitalize on the split among blacks over illegal immigration," by a group whose Web site is "filled with xenophobic, nativist, borderline race-tinged code word taunts at the 'invasion' of 'hordes' of 'illegal aliens.' "

As for Fair, he's featured in an ad that has appeared in The Washington Post and Roll Call sponsored by the Coalition for the Future of American Workers.

CFAW, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, is a front organization for racists and hate-mongers. Fair says he knows nothing about any such connection.

But the question remains: Why would anyone believe the same cabal that has actively worked against black interests suddenly is deeply concerned about protecting the interests of black workers?

Black people must take care not to be drawn into a war against poor, brown-skinned people, when what's at the heart of the immigration debate, it seems to me, is that low-wage workers, native-born or legal or undocumented immigrants, are often pitted against one another, with all being ruthlessly exploited.

The descendants of slaves, of all people, mustn't buy into this latest wave of anti-immigrant hysteria, but it happens every few years.

Politics may make strange bedfellows, but helping to promote a racist agenda is going too far.

Not only African Americans should beware of immigrant-bashing. So should the majority of other Americans -- descendants of immigrants who, just like Mexicans today, were demonized as job-stealing, disease-carrying threats to truth, justice and the American way.

I know this because I grew up with immigrants in New York City. I witnessed how they suffered at the hands of other immigrants who themselves had arrived in America only two or three steps ahead.

Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, also testified before Congress recently. A point he made bears repeating. Economists, he said, have not been able to establish any sort of consensus that immigrants are aggravating the long-existing causes of African-American unemployment.

In fact, economist Steven Pitts of the University of California's Center for Labor Research and Education has found that African Americans' unemployment rates over the last 50 years have almost always been twice that of whites. That disparity is holding fast; if new immigrants were the root of the problem, black unemployment would be going up.

My plea is that people at the bottom of the economic ladder stop squabbling over crumbs and direct their energies toward combating the real sources of their pain. Even as we speak, there are American fat cats overseas scouring for yet cheaper labor that will make no demands for humane pay and working conditions.

Ultimately, Henderson is right. How America treats its immigrants is a moral issue that "goes directly to our most basic understanding of civil and human rights."

Betty Winston Bayé's columns appear Thursdays. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.

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