It’s a simple concept: As the numbers of low-skilled workers increase relative to the number of jobs available to them, their value decreases in the market. This is welcomed by and great for big business, which can then hire employees at lower cost. But it’s not so good for the low-skilled, as finding jobs becomes more difficult and their wages will be lower.
This also means, however, that this phenomenon is not so good for another group: American blacks — as they constitute a disproportionate percentage of low-skilled workers.
In a Tuesday piece titled “Supporting Illegal Immigration Means Opposing Black Workers,” Newsweek commentator Adrian Norman outlines how illegal migration — which has risen to staggering levels under the Biden administration — is devastating our nation. “From healthcare facilities being required to provide services to migrants, to schools across the nation being required to educate migrant children, the effects of illegal immigration are already being shouldered by many,” he writes. Turning to the group it may harm most, however, he then continues:
Back in 2008, the United States Commission on Civil Rights … found that illegal workers comprise as much as one-third of immigrants, and that illegal immigration creates a surplus of low-skilled, low-wage labor in the U.S. labor market. Experts on the panel testified that while illegal immigration to the U.S. depresses employment and wages for low-skilled American citizens, Black men are disproportionately affected.
“About six in 10 adult black males have a high school diploma or less and Black men are disproportionately employed in the low-skilled labor market, where they are more likely to be in labor competition with immigrants,” the Commission noted in its findings.
Dr. Vernon Briggs, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at the New York State School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Cornell University, told the Commission that both Black Americans and illegal aliens are disproportionately concentrated in large metropolitan areas where competition between the two groups over jobs is likely to be extensive. To illegal immigrant workers, even low wages offered in the U.S. are higher than in their home country, and employers take advantage of this through preferential hiring of illegal workers.
Increasing the minimum wage is no solution to this, either — such laws mean nothing to employers who can pay illegals under the table.
Illegal migration’s effects on blacks have long been well known, too. In fact, 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,” website AfricanGlobe wrote in 2019. “Furthermore, the relationship held across a wide range of jobs. Basically, more immigration meant lower wages for Black Americans.”
Yet there’s even more to it. Newsweek points out that the entry-level jobs often taken by illegals are the same ones black Americans might use as stepping stones to gain experience, develop skills, and improve work ethic. Moreover, thus depriving black men makes them less marriageable, as a Pew Research Center study indicated.
Nonetheless, as is so often the case with humanity, one could quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo here and lament, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.” As AfricanGlobe notes, “Black Americans vote for Democrats by obsequious margins — often in excess of 90 percent” despite their being “hurt most by the Democrats’ immigration policy.”
This voting pattern explains a certain phenomenon, one addressed by Carol Swain, a black professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University. To wit: “By not taking a stand on immigration, Professor Swain contends, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is ignoring the interests of their constituency,” reported Vanderbilt’s website in 2007. “The CBC does not list immigration reform as a legislative priority, and Professor Swain found, only mentioned immigration in one press release out of almost a hundred posted on its web site.”
This hasn’t changed much since then, either, for a simple reason: Representatives don’t actually have to represent you when they can take your votes for granted.
Thus did the CBC fail to vigorously oppose the “Defund the Police” movement even though polls show that approximately 80 percent of blacks want the same or more law enforcement presence in their neighborhoods, not less. And thus do we hear the pseudo-elites bang on about “white supremacy,” “white privilege” (two mythical phenomena), “equity,” diversity, and “racism” even though average blacks are largely uninterested in these leftist imperatives.
In fact, a poll cited by commentator Tucker Carlson Thursday evening found that blacks didn’t rate diversity and racism as priorities, and “equity” was at the bottom of their list. What they cared most about were crime and violence.
This is yet another example of that chasm between the pseudo-elite and the street. As left-wing black commentator Pascal Robert himself admitted last December, the obsession with racial politics (e.g., “equity”) is a sort of establishment-protecting con. It’s a bit like a magician’s “misdirection” technique: Aside from their power- and wealth-increasing qualities, the pseudo-elites’ priorities serve to distract blacks from what’s actually hurting them.
“A typical example is a discussion sponsored by the African-American Alumni Association of the Harvard Business School called ‘Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap by Serving on Federal Reserve Boards,’” Pascal wrote, before wryly noting, “How a program targeting Black Harvard Business School graduates is going to change the lives of poor and working-class Black Americans is not entirely obvious.”
It won’t, of course. Eliminating illegal migration would, though. Given this, what could be said, under leftist philosophy, about an intractable (im)migration regime that hurts blacks but is dogmatically upheld by the establishment? Could it be called “systemically racist”?
