Thread: Why are African Americans brainwashed about illegal immigration?

Zero-Sum Gains: African Americans and Illegal Immigration

By Faye M. Anderson
Published in The Social Contract
Volume 18, Number 1 (Fall 2007)
Issue theme: "The future of an unsustainable planet"
https://www.thesocialcontract.com/ar...anderson.shtml

To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree, also, with those who label our efforts to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is unacceptable.

— Barbara Jordan¹ (Feb. 24, 1995)

The response to New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer’s proposal to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants drove home the fact: there is no racial gap in Americans’ attitudes toward unlawful immigration. Like white Americans, African Americans overwhelmingly opposed Spitzer’s reckless plan² that would have rewarded lawbreakers and undermined national security.
Of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, 56 percent came from Mexico and another 22 percent from the rest of Latin America, according to a report³ by the Pew Hispanic Center. The myth that African Americans and Latinos are “natural” allies flies in the face of our divergent histories, racial identities, and social mobility. From South-Central L.A. to Southeast D.C., tensions are rising as blacks and illegals compete for jobs, housing, teachers’ attention, and scarce resources for public schools and hospitals.
There is a growing crisis in black male joblessness, especially in urban areas. The Joint Economic Committee of Congress reports⁴:

• Black men have the highest unemployment rate at 8.4 percent.
• Labor force participation is lower among black men.
• Nearly 40 percent of black men were not working in 2006.

The problem of black male unemployment is particularly acute among young men.
A National Bureau of Economic Research study⁵ found a link between mass immigration and black unemployment:

These data reveal a strong correlation between immigration and black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates. As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, we find a reduction in the wage of black workers in that group, a reduction in the employment rate, and a corresponding increase in the incarceration rate.Moreover, these correlations are found in both national-level and state-level data.

Illegals’ informal networks shut out native-born workers, including African Americans, who would be willing to take jobs in industries now dominated by illegal workers. For instance, to ease tensions following the displacement of African Americans in the hospitality industry, the union contract for Local 2 of UNITE HERE in San Francisco includes new diversity language:

The Employer and the Union commit to act in good faith to outreach to the African-American and other minority communities in order to continue to attract them as applicants to the hotel.
The Employer and the Union shall work in partnership in their commitment to ensure the diversity of the Employer’s workforce, to continue to include all minorities, through a coordinated outreach program.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of illegal immigrants flooded into New Orleans, according to a study⁶ by Tulane University’s Payson Center and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. At the same time, black Americans were not allowed to return to their homes in the Lower Ninth Ward prompting Mayor C. Ray Nagin to ask, “How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?”
While African American and Latino elites talk about a “shared agenda,” political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchison⁷, author of The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation Between African Americans and Hispanics, acknowledges there is a disconnect between black elites and the grassroots:

Although most civil rights leaders and black Democrats publicly embraced the immigrant rights struggle, many blacks privately expressed dread about being bypassed in the battle against poverty and discrimination, and some were actively hostile to the goals of immigrant groups. At a 2005 meeting in L.A., for instance, black radio host Terry Anderson summed up a not-uncommon position in the African American community when he blamed illegal immigrants for stealing jobs from blacks and crowding schools. “We’ve been invaded,” he said. “There’s no other word for it.”

A presumed black-brown alliance raises some questions: Why? Who benefits? While Latinos are the nation’s largest minority group, without the right to vote, population alone will not yield political power. Indeed, a study⁸ by the Center for Immigration Studies found that 50 percent of immigrants from Mexico and Central America are in the country illegally, and one-third of those from South America are illegal. Cleary, it will be decades before Latino political power matches their numbers.
So, why should African Americans use their political capital to empower illegal immigrants, who have no political voice?
Consider: The term “Hispanic” is a bureaucratic construct that includes people of any race. Before 2000, there were four racial classifications— American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, and White. Respondents could mark only one box. While there still is no multiracial category, respondents can now check “one or more races” or “some other race.”
The majority of Latinos are of mixed blood or mestizo. Throughout the Americas, there is persistent racial discrimination against the region’s 150 million Afrodescendentes, who like black Americans, are of African descent.
In the U.S., a person who has “one drop” of black blood and who is “light, bright, damn near white” is black. But Latinos, whose skin color may be as dark as or darker than mine, do not identify as black. Once they sneak across the border or overstay their visa, they become “white.”
In the 2000 Census, 50 percent of Hispanics self-identified as “White”; less than three percent checked “Black.” The 2004 American Community Survey⁹ shows that 58.5 percent of Hispanics self-identified as “White,” 35.2 percent checked “some other race,” and 3.6 percent indicated two or more races. Tellingly, a mere 1.6 percent self-idenfied as “Black.”
In a five-part series¹⁰ on the black experience in Latin America, the Miami Herald reported:

Today, blacks in Latin America face daunting obstacles. Chances are they will get a shoddy education, drop out of school early, earn less money than whites and fade into the masses of urban and rural poor.

To address the marginalization of Afro-descendants, Afro-Latino leaders have organized Afroamerica XXI, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote “solutions to the problems that African Descendants face due to racial discrimination and poverty” in the 13 countries in Latin America, including Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua.
In the first comprehensive assessment¹¹ of Afro-Latinos in Latin America, the Congressional Research Service reported:

People of African descent comprise a significant portion of the population in several Latin American countries, and account for nearly 50 percent of the region’s poor. For many Afro-descendants, endemic poverty is reportedly exacerbated by isolation, exclusion, and racial discrimination. The IDB [Inter-American Development Bank] notes that Afro-Latinos are among the most “invisible” of the excluded groups as they are not well-represented among national political, economic, and educational leadership in the region. They have also been, until recently, absent from many countries’ census and socioeconomic data.

Afro-Latinos make up less than one percent of Mexico’s population of more than 108 million. As in the rest of the Americas, they are invisible. That changed in 2005 when Memín Pinguín, an Afro-Mexican comic character with exaggerated lips and eyes, was featured on a series of five stamps issued by the Mexican Postal Service.
The NAACP, National Urban League, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and other African American organizations called on then-Mexican President Vicente Fox to apologize for the racist images and cancel the stamps. The stamps were defended as “cultural icons of the Mexican people.” Fox told the Associated Press that Memín Pinguín is “an image in a comic I have known since infancy. It is cherished here in Mexico.”
The racial hierarchy and stereotypes that Mexicans bring with them was laid bare by Fox in remarks before a group of Texas businessmen meeting in Mexico:

There’s no doubt that the Mexican men and women—full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work—are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States.

As the daughter of a blue-collar laborer and domestic worker, I found Fox’s comment deeply offensive. Who performed those jobs before the wave of illegals from Mexico?
What, pray tell, is the predicate for a black-brown alliance, or more accurately, a black-Mexican alliance since Mexicans make up 64 percent of the Latino population? Simply put, there is none. It is naïve to expect illegal aliens from Mexico will be invited to join hands and sing “Kumbaya.”
It bears remembering that in 1994, 47 percent of blacks voted for California’s Prop. 187, which would have denied certain government services to illegal immigrants (the initiative was struck down by a federal court). In 1998, 48 percent of blacks supported Prop. 227, which eliminated bilingual classes in California’s public schools.
Fast forward to the debate over so-called comprehensive immigration reform, black talk show hosts note their callers overwhelmingly opposed the Senate’s amnesty legislation. Joe Madison, host of XM Radio’s “The Black Eagle,” told Lou Dobbs that “not one person” supported Gov. Spitzer’s licensing plan.
Still, African Americans have been slow to move beyond criticizing illegal immigration and actually enter the arenas where the policy debate is unfolding. Truth be told, reports¹² of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan have had a chilling effect on black Americans speaking out. Blacks are ambivalent about being on the same side as groups that have historically opposed our full participation in American society.
But black Americans can stand firm for the rule of law and stand against those who would deny us our claim to the American Dream. We stand on the shoulders of an earlier generation of black activists who during World War II launched the “Double V Campaign,” victory abroad against the enemies from without and victory at home against enemies from within, including the Klan and Jim Crow laws.
Today, we can follow the lead of Congressional Black Caucus members, Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) and Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.). Reps. Bishop and Davis are co-sponsors of the “Secure America through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007,” which would secure the border and strengthen interior enforcement.
The rule of law is paramount for black Americans. It was, after all, our trust in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s right to vote that gave us faith and hope that we would overcome.
Illegal aliens make a mockery of our history when they draw parallels between their “movement” for vague “human rights” and black Americans’ struggle for enforcement of rights guaranteedcitizens by the Constitution. Black Americans must get in the immigration policy arena to ensure the illegal immigration lobby does not co-opt the moral authority of the civil rights movement to confer public benefits on illegal aliens whose very presence in the country is an unacceptable flouting of the rule of law.

https://www.thesocialcontract.com/ar..._printer.shtml

Illegal Immigration Hurts Black Americans Most

By Spencer P. Morrison| October 24th, 2018

I

n the 19th century, savvy American saloon-owners offered free lunches to attract noontime patrons. Inevitably, the diners would get thirsty and buy expensive drinks—thus was born the expression, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Despite its humble origins, the phrase captures a deep and omnipresent truth: everything has a price, an opportunity cost, a trade-off.
This is as true of lunches as it is of America’s immigration policy. Although The Economist‘s propaganda-artists claim otherwise, mass immigration does not enrich all Americans. There are obvious winners and losers. The winners are wealthy Americans and the immigrants themselves; the losers are everyone else, especially the working class, Millennials, and black Americans.


Black Americans are an interesting demographic. On the one hand, black Americans vote for Democrats by obsequious margins—often in excess of 90 percent. And yet black Americans are hurt most by the Democrats’ immigration policy.
In short: mass immigration, legal and illegal, disproportionately hurts black Americans because they are the ones most likely to compete directly with immigrants for work.


At the Hot Gates
A great mob of men marches towards our southern border—thousands strong and growing daily. All eyes are on them. But what do they matter? As of Tuesday, the number had grown to an estimated 14,000 people. But the size of this particular group is insignificant compared to the tens of millions who already reside within our borders.

Before we can begin assess the economic impact of illegal immigration, we need to wrap our heads around just how many aliens live in America already. Pew Research estimates that some 11.1 million illegals reside within our borders. Although this falls in line with figures from the Department of Homeland Security, many—myself included—believe the true figure is much higher.
There are two reasons for this. First, the “official” figures do not include the children of illegal immigrants who were born in America—the “anchor babies.” Although natural-born citizens, these individuals are only here and only “Americans” because of their parents’ illegal activity.
Can we blame them for their parents’ actions? No. But there’s no denying that the addition of 6.5 millionchildren is a burden on our welfare state and educational system—especially since their parents contributed nothing toward its creation, and now contribute very little toward its operating costs.



Second, the official aggregate figures (suspiciously) plateau around 2007. The explanation is that after 2008 the number of migrants fell and deportations rose to a point of equilibrium. There is little evidence that migration rates fell, however, and the reason deportations increased is that the Obama Administration simply changed the definition of “deportation” to inflate the numbers.
If the official figures are flawed, then just how many illegal aliens reside in America?
A relatively recent study conducted by Dr. Mohammad Fazel Zarandi of the Yale School of Management estimates that some 22.8 million illegal immigrants live in the United States. This figure draws upon more recent data and a variety of (sometimes-ignored) sources, and is likely more accurate than estimates from Pew or the DHS.
Regardless of which estimate we use, the impact of illegal immigration is magnified because alien populations are heavily concentration in a number of specific states and cities. For example, California alone is home to nearly one-in-four illegal migrants, and the majority of these live in the Greater Los Angeles area. Meanwhile, cities like St. Louis and states such as North Dakota have very few illegal aliens.
To sum up: there are at least 22.8 million illegal aliens in America, and they are heavily concentrated in a few particular urban areas.
Into the Octagon
In 2008, Vernon Briggs, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He stated matter-of-factly that there was “little doubt” that black Americans are the “major loser” in the immigration equation. Briggs explained:

Because most illegal immigrants overwhelmingly seek work in the low skilled labor market and because the black American labor force is so disproportionately concentrated in this same low wage sector, there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market. Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers…it is obvious that the major loser in this competition are low skilled black workers.

Basically, illegal migrants generally work low-wage jobs—the very jobs so many black Americans tend to work. Likewise, both aliens and blacks tend to reside in major cities. Taken together, this means that migrants and black Americans compete directly for the same jobs, which reduces wages and employment opportunities.
Unfortunately, black Americans fare worse in this head-to-head struggle because illegal aliens often work under-the-table for less than minimum wage and forgo expensive employer-provided healthcare plans. They undercut the labor-market’s mandated floor, and pull the rug out from under American workers.
These findings are backed up by decades of studies. For example, a 1995 study conducted by Augustine Kposowa found that when compared to white Americans, “non-whites appear to lose jobs to immigrants and their earnings are more depressed by immigrants.” These non-whites mostly include black and Hispanic American citizens.
A 1998 study of the New York area by David Howell and Elizabeth Mueller of the New School for Social Research found that a 10 percent increase in the immigrant share of any given occupation reduced wages of the black men working in that occupation by five percentage points. Furthermore, the relationship held across a wide range of jobs. Basically, more immigration meant lower wages for black Americans.
I have cited these older papers not because nothing newer exists—feel free to browse the work of Harvard University’s George Borjas, or read my recent article on the economics of immigration—but to show that we have known about this for decades. And yet, the Democrats have done nothing to save their most stalwart voters from the ravages of illegal migration.
I cannot help but wonder: why?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/24/i...mericans-most/

20 MAR 2019 ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION’S BURDEN ON OPPORTUNITY, WELFARE AND BLACK AMERICA

CONSERVATIVEBLOG.ORG

Posted at 16:50h in Blog, Featured, Project 21 by David Almasi

The flow of illegal immigrants into the United States led President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency to try to enhance border security. While the President focused on crime as a key reason for his declaration, Project 21 member Jerome Danner – in keeping with the case made in Project 21’s “Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America” – says a real problem is that “[r]ising levels of illegal immigration threaten American workers and taxpayers.”

In a commentary published on the Fox News website, Jerome writes that data on crime involving illegal immigrants is “simply too unreliable to draw firm conclusions.” That being said, there is still plenty to be worried about regarding illegal immigration. A focus on crime, he contends, “obscures the bigger threat from illegal immigration: the massive economic burden imposed on American workers and taxpayers.”
Noting that an estimated 8 million of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States are in the American workforce, Jerome writes that those here illegally have expanded the workforce by around 25 percent:

This competition disproportionately harms less-educated Americans. Each 10-percent increase in the size of the low-skilled labor force decreases workers’ wages by at least three percent, according to research from Harvard professor George Borjas. Competition with immigrant laborers depresses the annual wages of Americans without high school diplomas by up to $1,500.
These less-skilled American workers are among the most vulnerable members of society. They already struggle to afford health care and nutritious food. By turning a blind eye to illegal immigration, our elected officials are effectively kicking these workers while they are down.

Jerome also points out that illegal immigration puts a strain on public services where “American taxpayers are often stuck with the bill.”
At an estimated total price tag of $116 billion annually, Jerome lists the welfare costs that result from those who illegally enter the United States:

Consider health care: More than seven in 10 illegal immigrants do not have health insurance. When they get sick, they frequently turn to emergency rooms, which legally cannot turn patients away. The cost of that care is ultimately passed on to government programs and everyone with a private insurance plan. Americans pay about $18 billion a year to provide free and subsidized health care for illegal immigrants.

The same goes for welfare and food assistance programs. Eighty-nine percent of households headed by illegal immigrant parents utilize at least one welfare program. These families draw nearly $6 billion in welfare benefits per year.
Children from illegal immigrant households also strain our public-school system. Nearly a quarter of students in U.S. public schools now speak a language other than English at home – that share has more than doubled since 1980. Taxpayers shell out roughly $1.6 billion a year to teach these kids English.

Project 21 has advocated for immigration reform that acknowledges those facts. It has asked government to ensure that the American people – especially black Americans, who often share the same communities and services as illegal immigrants – not “be forced to subsidize people who are not in the United States legally.”

As noted in Project 21’s Blueprint, “[t]he influx of millions of people into our country illegally has strained public services and placed a disproportionate burden on black communities.” To offer a better deal for black Americans, Project 21 recommends that governments:

• Bar illegal aliens from accessing any public services, except emergency services.
• Terminate federal funding of any social service agency that provides non-emergency services to illegal immigrants.
• Prosecute providers and recipients who allow scarce federally-funded social services to be used by those who are in the country illegally.
• End states’ special programs for assisting unlawful immigrants, redirecting those funds to needy citizens.

To read more about these and other recommendations in Project 21’s “Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America,” click here.
To read Jerome’s entire commentary – “Yes, Illegal Immigration is a National Emergency, But Not for the Reasons Trump is Giving” – as it appears on the Fox News website, click here.




https://nationalcenter.org/project21...black-america/

Liberals say immigration enforcement is racist, but the group most likely to benefit from it is black men

By DAVE SEMINARA
MAR 16, 2018 | 4:15 AM



A worker assembles an engine at Ford's Chicago Assembly Plant on June 9, 2015. (M. Spencer Green / Associated Press)

President Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton seemed to herald a new era for border security and immigration enforcement. But his polarizing and occasionally ignorant comments about immigrants have handed his adversaries a convenient pretext for stymying compromise on immigration reform: racism.

Left-leaning advocacy groups and a host of Democrats all too often shy away from the specifics of the debate and instead lean on cries of bigotry, resorting to claims like that of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has described Trump’s approach to immigration reform as an effort to “make America white again.”

Claims that immigration enforcement equals racism ignore the reality that the group most likely to benefit from a tougher approach to immigration enforcement is young black men, who often compete with recent immigrants for low-skilled jobs.

This dynamic played out recently at a large bakery in Chicago that supplies buns to McDonald’s. Some 800 immigrant laborers, most of them from Mexico, lost their jobs last year after an audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Cloverhill Bakery, owned by Aryzta, a big Swiss food conglomerate, had to hire new workers, 80% to 90% of whom are African American. According to the Chicago Sun Times, the new workers are paid $14 per hour, or $4 per hour more than the (illegal) immigrant workers.

In this case, and in many others, the beneficiaries of immigration enforcement were working-class blacks, who are often passed over for jobs by unscrupulous employers.

The labor force participation rate for adult black men has declined steadily since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ushered in a new era of mass immigration. In 1973, the rate was 79%. It is now at 68%, and the Bureau of Labor projects that it will decline to 61% by 2026.

The beneficiaries of immigration enforcement [are] working-class blacks, who are often passed over for jobs by unscrupulous employers.

In 2016, the Obama White House produced a 48-page reportacknowledging that immigration does not help the labor force participation rate of the native-born. It concluded, however, that “immigration reform would raise the overall participation rate by bringing in new workers of prime working age.”

Although the report used the term “new workers,” Democrats may also be tempted by the prospect of new voters. But they should be aware that in courting one group, they risk losing others.

African Americans tend to be a reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, but they have repeatedly indicated in public opinion surveys that they want significantly less immigration.

A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that African Americans favor reducing legal immigration more than any other demographic group: 85% want less than the million-plus we allow on an annual basis, and 54% opted for the most stringent choices offered — 250,000 immigrants per year or less, or none at all.

These attitudes are rational.

In a 2010 study on the social effects of immigration, the Cornell University professor Vernon Briggs concluded: “No racial or ethnic group has benefited less or been harmed more than the nation’s African American community.”

The Harvard economist George Borjas has found that, between 1980 and 2000, one-third of the decline in the employment among black male high school dropouts was attributable to immigration. He also reported “a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates.”

In a 2014 paper on neoliberal immigration policies and their effects on African Americans, the University of Notre Dame professor Stephen Steinberg argued that, thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, “African Americans found themselves in the proverbial position of being ‘last hired.’” Steinberg also noted that “immigrants have been cited as proof that African Americans lack the pluck and determination that have allowed millions of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean to pursue the American dream.”

The struggles of black men obviously cannot all be linked to immigration, but it’s clear that the status quo does not benefit them.

As elected leaders consider changing our immigration laws, the interests of America’s most vulnerable citizens shouldn’t be overlooked. The first step toward honest reform is for the Democratic Party to admit that while liberal immigration enforcement might help them win new voters, it also harms and disenfranchises their most loyal constituency.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-e...316-story.html