For many African-Americans, today’s debate over immigration evokes a bitter sense of deja vu. In 1965, a new immigration law restarted mass immigration just as African-Americans, emerging from long years of segregation, were poised to enter the economic mainstream. In the decades since, millions of immigrants – legal and illegal – have settled here, causing the immigrant population to balloon from fewer than 10 million in 1970 to about 36 million today.
Black Americans have suffered economically in periods of high immigration. On the other hand, when immigration ebbed and labor supply was tight – during World War I, for example – African-American prosperity soared.
The current wave of immigration has been especially destructive, coming at a time of severe economic restructuring caused by globalization and outsourcing. Unlike previous immigration cycles, this massive influx continues with no natural end in site. What’s more, since immigrants are likely to have little education, immigration is significantly adding to the economic challenges of the underclass by importing competitors for jobs. The effects are predictable: Wages drop, working conditions deteriorate, and the native-born are crowded out of the job market. Education, medical care and other services are diverted to address new, unplanned-for needs. Whole industries have organized themselves in expectation of an unending supply of foreign labor.
The effects have been devastating to many African-Americans. A study from Northeastern University reports, “The existence of slack labor market conditions in recent years has created more direct competition for available jobs between immigrants and many subgroups of native workers.” Of those “subgroups,” African-Americans, especially less educated black men, find themselves squeezed out of entry-level positions that previously served as the first rung into stable work. Now those rungs are increasingly occupied by immigrants, both legal and illegal. Even higher-skilled African-Americans are experiencing artificial competition from such programs as the H-1B visa, a cheap-labor program that computer companies are ferociously lobbying to expand.
Now President Bush and many in Congress are calling for “comprehensive immigration reform.” All of the various plans would reward more than 12 million illegal aliens with legal status – i.e., amnesty – and further increase today’s record-high levels of legal immigration. Experience has proven that we should view such “fixes” with skepticism. In 1965, Americans were assured that the new immigration law would neither change the demographic makeup of the country nor increase the population. Likewise, the 1986 amnesty was touted as a one-time-only event; we now know that amnesty actually increases illegal immigration.
If the first responsibility of our lawmakers is to ensure that their actions do not harm their fellow Americans, then all of the “comprehensive” reforms fall short, because none provide genuine protection, relief or equity for our country’s own disadvantaged citizens.
