Not-so-hidden costs of immigration policy hurt black Americans

Clarence Page:

Controlled and orderly immigration is enriching for our country. But massive large-scale immigration puts a squeeze on low-wage workers who already are here and facing a shrinking demand for their low-skilled labors.

Since 1965, the traditional trickle of new immigrants, which averaged a little more than 200,000 a year over the nation's history, surged upward to an estimated 2 million a year, about half of them illegal.

That puts pressure on wages at a time when low-skilled jobs have dried up. Increased immigration was one of five major factors that led to that job decline, as Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recounted in his 1996 book When Work Disappears.

The other four were the nation's shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, the increased outsourcing of low-skilled work to countries where labor is cheaper, advances in technology that have increased demand for high-skilled workers while reducing demand for low-skilled workers, and the decline of unions that traditionally drive up wages and benefits.

Yet we continue to hear about how illegals only take the "jobs nobody wants."

Whenever I hear someone talk about the "jobs nobody wants," what I really hear is "jobs that pay less than most Americans need to support their families."

The unexpected sweeping success of welfare reform at moving mothers off welfare and into work should have exploded that myth, yet it persists, fed by stereotypes that feed on themselves.

A closer look finds another reality: There are more people looking for work in deindustrialized urban communities than there are jobs available. One often-cited study of fast-food businesses in Harlem by anthropologist Katherine Newman at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government 10 years ago found 14 applicants for every job that was filled. A year later, her study found, only 25 percent of those who were turned down had found work.

Despite the stereotype of immigrants taking only hard-labor jobs that unemployed blacks and others don't want, the percentage of immigrants in the laborer and fabricator category of the labor force, 20 percent, was slightly less than that of African-Americans, 22 percent, in the 1998 Census survey.

Yet the invisible struggles of real-life poor black folks can hardly compete with the distorted media images.

A century ago, black industrialists such as Booker T. Washington, black civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and later black labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph were united in their call for sharp reductions in new immigration, then mostly from Europe, as long as there was an abundant supply of available, able-bodied black workers already here.

That's changed since the 1960s. Today, largely in pursuit of political solidarity across ethnic lines, it is hard to find a major black politician or civil rights leader who will call for reducing illegal immigration, let alone scaling back legal immigration.

And yet Democrats continue to support illegal immigration in spite of the fact that it hurts the people - blacks and the poor - that they claim to represent.