Corporate media outlets recently locked arms to dispel Donald Trump’s assertion that illegal immigration hurts “black jobs,” yet experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the former president is right about the problem being all too real.
Trump said during a Q&A with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) that “coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking black jobs,” according to Politico, with the remarks igniting a bevy of critiques from corporate media outlets, with one going as far to say that “black jobs” don’t exist and others leaning on experts to characterize the assertion as “not true.” However, the reality is that immigration has a depressive effect on wages and employment, with experts pointing out how illegal immigration has disproportionately affected industries and localities where black Americans frequently work. (RELATED: Majority Of Americans Want Less Immigration For First Time In Years: POLL)
Immigration has been a driver of black unemployment for “over 200 years,” Andre Barnes, Historically Black Colleges and Universities engagement director at NumbersUSA, told the DCNF.
“During the First World War there was a halt to immigration, and all of a sudden, factories in the North could not get enough people to work, so where did they go for their labor supply? Black Americans.” Barnes told the DCNF. “We had the 1924 Immigration Act, and it reduced immigration from 700,000 to less than 200,000 per year, and the level stayed at less than 200,000 per year for over four years. And what did we see during that time period? You saw an increase in black employment. We saw an increase in black economic power.”
In response to those who doubt immigration’s effects on black employment, Barnes gave the example of a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, which lost 1,500 immigrant workers after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid, according to The New York Times in 2008. After the raids, the factory saw its proportion of black workers go from 20% to 60%.
“When we’re talking about black jobs, we’re talking about these situations here,” Barnes said. “We’re talking about the meat packing jobs that are disappearing between the 90s and the early 2010s that went from majority black to majority Hispanic. That’s what people need to talk about when they’re talking about black jobs.”
Migrants walk on the US side of the border wall in Jacumba Hot Springs, California on June 5, 2024, after walking across from Mexico. Migrants from countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Guatemala, Nicaragua, China and India made their way on foot into the United States today before being met with by Customs and Border Patrol agents for processing. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP)
In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had over 2 million encounters at the southern border, according to CBP data. Since President Joe Biden took office, there have been 1.7 million known “gotaways” that evaded border patrol, according to the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Most illegal immigrants originate from Mexico, according to Pew Research data in July. Those illegal immigrants make up large shares of multiple low-skill sectors, including agriculture, construction and manufacturing, according to Pew Research in 2020.
E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that since black workers are a large part of the low-skill labor force, the arrival of mostly low-skill immigrant workers means black Americans face pressure on their wages and employment.
“When President Trump says illegals are taking away black jobs, I don’t see any [other] way to interpret that than they are competing with black Americans who have those jobs,” Antoni said. “And because of the increased competition, they are losing those jobs. A disproportionate amount of black people have unskilled jobs, it has nothing to do with skin color.”
Immigration depresses wages and employment, particularly in the black community, due to the increase in labor supply, according to a 2010 study from the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights. It found that since the black community is “disproportionately employed in the low-skill labor market,” the effects of immigration affect black Americans more than other groups.
Gordon Hanson, urban policy professor at Harvard University and co-author on a 2006 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on immigration and black employment, told the DCNF that while immigration affects labor markets, we’ve learned more since 2006 on its effects to certain demographics and what industries and places in America are most vulnerable.
“We’ve learned that immigration’s impact on labor markets depends much more on your occupation and where you live than on your demographic characteristics, such as your race or ethnicity,” Hanson told the DCNF. “If there are groups in the labor market, be it workers who are black, Hispanic, or others, who live in places where the local economy has declined or who have education or experience levels that leave them exposed to adverse events in the broader economy (such as globalization or technological change), then these groups are likely to be affected disproportionately by any such negative changes. But the impacts on these workers aren’t about their race or ethnicity. They are about the segment of the labor market that these workers happen to occupy.”
When the amount of workers increased by 10% from immigration, wages for black workers decreased by 4%, employment by 3.5% and black incarceration increased by 0.8%, according to the NBER in 2006. For white men, there was a 4.1% decrease in wages, but only a 1.6% decrease in employment and a 0.1% increase in white incarceration.
The Biden administration began in June to restrict new asylum requests at the southern border if the daily average over a week exceeds 2,500. However, jobs growth touted by the administration highly depends on immigrant labor, as foreign-born workers got drastically more jobs overall than native born Americans.
“Illegal immigration disproportionately affects black workers, including other minority workers, and we need to do everything to protect them from their jobs from being taken away,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the DCNF, saying that around 1.1 million jobs went to foreign-born workers as native-born Americans saw a 943,000 job decrease over the past year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
“Black unemployment continues to be higher than when President Trump was in office, ” Leavitt said. “And real wages for black Americans are lower under Biden-Harris. That is why President Trump has promised the largest deportation operation in American history since President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kamala Harris will give amnesty and citizenship to all 15 million illegal aliens and make permanent the assault on black American jobs.”
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