Black leaders and immigration
Dave Gorak:
Jackson and other black leaders have stood mute for decades while our federal government has kept in place an immigration policy that has imported millions of cheap foreign workers, many of them illegal, who have displaced black workers in the low-paying jobs they once did but for better wages. Mexican President Vicente Fox's racist comment about black workers is not the root cause of why 40 percent of black males between the ages of 18 and 65 are out of work.
Jackson's meeting with Fox in Mexico accomplished nothing. Were Jackson a responsible leader, he and other prominent blacks would've gone to Washington years ago to meet with our president to demand an end to an immigration policy that has turned back the economic and political clock on black Americans and made them this nation's second largest minority.
Among the more celebrated examples of how immigrant workers have hurt black Americans is the decline of the janitorial industry in Los Angeles. In the early 1980s, janitors earned about $18 an hour. But by 1985 black members plunged to 600 from 2,500, and only 100 of them earned union wages.
But this is nothing new. What mass immigration is doing to black Americans today is a carbon copy of what the "Great Wave" of immigration from Europe did to them at the end of the 19th century. But then there were responsible black leaders like Booker T. Washington who, in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech to American industrialists, urged them to hire blacks before the newly arrived immigrants.
Rather than deal with the real problem, the best Jackson and others can offer are symbolic gestures that do nothing to protect the people they say they care about. For example: Jackson just announced he is forming a multiracial coalition with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to look after the interests of blacks and Hispanics. (MALDEF supports amnesty for the millions of illegals here who have stolen jobs and wages from our working poor.) Why would Jackson want to help those whose presence has hurt blacks so much?
Of course, Jesse Jackson is primarily concerned with helping Jesse Jackson.
posted by Adam Lawson @ 12:13 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Not long ago I saw an article about how "minority" (i.e. non-white) groups (in Houston, as I recall) were going to combine resources so their 'activism' would be more effective. It seemed the unstated undercurrent/premise of the article was that this 'activism' would be aimed at whites.
So maybe some black leaders are thinking along these lines.
The prevailing opinion in Mexico seems to be that Black males as a group don't have much interest in working if they can avoid it. Even the Archbishop of Mexico City recently defended Fox's comments. Apparently Mexican priests are not necessarily anti-national and masochistic like US priests always seem to be. But the interesting thing is that not so many years ago "evil White racists"(usually based in the Southern US) kept telling us that Black males were "work-shy". We, of course, didn't believe them because we just knew that we were only motivated by mindless bigotry.
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