Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [28]
HELPING BLACKS
Of course, no “significant” negative impact is not the same as no negative impact at all. And some protectionists argue that, however small the repercussions, immigration should be curtailed for the benefit of those Americans who compete most directly with low-skilled foreign workers for entry-level jobs. Black Americans, who are disproportionately concentrated in low-skilled jobs, are considered especially vulnerable. The black unemployment rate is typically double that of whites and significantly higher among black males. Can this situation be laid to immigrants?
Two years ago, when a prominent black minister in Chicago told The New York Times that “immigration will destroy the economic base of the African-American community, ” he joined a long queue of restrictionist black leaders and intelligentsia. As Congress debated the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a number of black newspapers called for its passage, including the Colored American in Washington, D.C., which wrote, “There is no room for these disease-breeding, miserly, clannish, and heathen Chinese.” Later, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington would complain that immigrant labor was pushing blacks out of manufacturing jobs. The black separatist Marcus Garvey—an immigrant from Jamaica, by the way—and sworn enemy of more mainstream civil rights leaders like Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, nevertheless found common ground with them when it came to railing against the Eastern Europeans who were pouring into Northern cities in the first part of the twentieth century.
Others at the time, like the influential Immigration Restriction League, an early-twentieth-century nativist group comprised of white Northerners, disingenuously cited “the welfare of the negro” as a chief reason to oppose immigration. Today, vigilante groups like the Minuteman Project make similar claims, notwithstanding their links to white nationalists and the prominent presence of Confederate flags at their rallies.
The persistence of this uneasy relationship between immigrants and some in the black community was illustrated in a 2006 episode involving Andrew Young, the one-time Martin Luther King Jr. confidante and civil rights icon. Young had been retained by Wal-Mart to help the company fend off attacks from labor unions and politicians. And when a reporter from a black newspaper asked him about the retail giant displacing mom-and-pop stores in black neighborhoods, Young responded by trying to shift the target of animus from Wal-Mart to Jewish, Korean, and Arab immigrant merchants “overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables,” among other things. “I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough,” said Young. “Very few black people own these stores.”
Young immediately apologized and resigned his post. And although his comments understandably caused a short-lived media tempest, many black Americans wondered what all the fuss was about. Reacting to the brouhaha, a commentator on National Public Radio noted matter-of-factly, “Truth is, in my world, Los Angeles, most of the mom-and-pop stores in the predominantly black sections are owned by Koreans and Jews. And they do overcharge and they tend to be rude and hostile to their black customers. And the blacks employed in these shops are most often not allowed to handle the cash register. The overall result of this environment is a long history of bad attitudes, scuffles, and even one death. What pains me is that Andrew Young stated this truth, then apologized.”
Such thinking was also behind the Detroit city council’s decision in 2004 to approve a racially exclusive business district for black entrepreneurs. The premise of the proposal, which was legally suspect and ultimately rejected, was that immigrants from Latin America and the Middle East were taking jobs and resources that otherwise would be going to black natives.
In last year’s debate Congressional Black Caucus members at one point visibly broke with Latino colleagues, who are normally strong allies. During a House Judiciary