Blacks, Latinos and jobs

Teresa Watanabe:

Najee Ali, an African American activist, tries to turn out for as many civil rights rallies as he can. But on the day that hundreds of thousands of Latinos marched through downtown Los Angeles for immigrant rights, he had no idea it was happening until he turned on the TV.

"They didn't call us; they didn't need to call us," Ali said of organizers of the march last month during a recent dialogue between blacks and Latinos about immigration. "Once I saw the half million, I felt fear, in a sense, that [blacks] might be marginalized in the future when it comes to jobs and political empowerment."

Ali's fears underscore the complex sentiments many African Americans feel about the surging number of immigrants who have transformed their neighborhoods and schools, the workplace and the political arena.

The majority of blacks sided with Latinos and Asians in supporting bilingual education and opposing a 1994 statewide initiative that, had it not been overturned in court, would have denied benefits to illegal immigrants. Yet many say they also feel an acute sense of encroachment and at times competition from the newcomers.

So far, African American voices have not been featured in the national debate over immigration reform, even though some believe they have the most at stake.

"In this era of mass immigration, no group has benefited less or been harmed more than the African American population," said Vernon M. Briggs Jr., a Cornell University labor economist who has studied the effect of immigration on blacks for more than three decades.

In a 2004 book, "The Impact of Immigration on African Americans," Briggs and other scholars charted myriad effects, including lower wages for less skilled and less educated blacks and their substantial displacement from the job market, with many dropping out of the labor pool entirely. In education, they found that providing remedial resources for immigrant students cut into resources for native-born students and that immigrants modestly displaced blacks from affirmative action programs.

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