To the editor: Black America pays price for illegal immigration
Democrats are forsaking the African-American community with their politically motivated refusal to secure our borders.
In the 2018 elections, 90 percent of black Americans voted for Democrats. When asked by pollsters, 73 percent of them said they oppose Trump’s proposed border wall, yet roughly two-thirds identified border security as “an important issue.”
This apparent contradiction reveals that while Democrat rhetoric retains some power to captivate black voters, we can’t be deceived about the matters that impact us most.
No group in America has suffered more from decades of unchecked illegal immigration than African-Americans, yet Democrats expect us to compliantly support a radical open-borders agenda that promises us nothing but more hardship.
There isn’t a single reason for black Americans, even black Democrats, to align themselves with the open-borders ideologues of the contemporary Democrat Party. In general, illegal immigrants make the job market better for employers and less favorable for workers, but the losses aren’t distributed evenly. Job and wage losses fall disproportionately on the shoulders of African-Americans, especially African-American men.
Part of this has to do with education, because those with less education are the most vulnerable to competition from cheap illegal immigrant labor. Unfortunately, nearly one in six black men lack a high school diploma, compared to around one in 13 white men.
Illegal immigrants are on average much poorer and less educated than native-born Americans. Contrary to the rhetoric about “jobs Americans won’t do,” the jobs illegal immigrants take are just the ones that the pampered elites don’t want to do. The jobs where illegal immigrants make up a significant share of the workforce are the very jobs that offer the greatest opportunities for less-educated and poorer Americans.
History has shown repeatedly that the threat to African-American workers isn’t theoretical.
When immigration skyrocketed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, African-Americans’ employment gap with whites skyrocketed right along with it. The gap shrunk steadily over the next two decades as both parties pursued more aggressive immigration enforcement policies, only to spike again during the Obama administration.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, the urban black community was ravaged by the crack an addictive white substance epidemic. Black wages and employment suffered immensely, while ******* and incarceration rates multiplied. Yet, for all the carnage that crack wrought on the inner city, a study by leading economists found that immigration actually did more damage to the economic prospects of African-American men than the ******* epidemic.
Illegal immigration has brought members of MS-13 and dozens of other transnational criminal gangs into America, and while white victims of illegal alien crimes tend to get most of the media spotlight, white people are less likely than blacks to live in the neighborhoods and towns most affected by the *******, violence, and human trafficking those gangs introduce.
The media overlook the surge in anti-black hate crime that occurs when illegal immigrant gang members move into historically black neighborhoods. The fact is, blacks remain more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes as whites — and allowing illegal immigrants to flood into our communities only exacerbates that problem.
President Trump has gone to great lengths to show he understands these realities, but his message has fallen on deaf Democrat ears. They didn’t even clap when the President touted the record-low black unemployment rate during his State of the Union address, demonstrating just how little today’s liberals care about the needs and concerns of African-Americans.
In 2016, Donald Trump asked black Americans to think about what they had to lose by voting for him. Considering that the Democrats are promoting immigration policies that would detrimentally affect the safety and prosperity of African-American communities, it’s clear that they’ve already abandoned us. We have absolutely nothing to lose by abandoning them.
The writer is CEO of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump and a member of the Donald J. Trump for President Inc. advisory board.
Democrats are forsaking the African-American community with their politically motivated refusal to secure our borders. In the 2018 elections, 90 percent ...
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