How our immigration policies failed Black Americans

Every now and then, similar articles appear on Black Americans and immigration:

This year marks a milestone in Black American history. It’s the 50^th anniversary of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s televised speech to the nation regarding the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

Widely considered one of the best American political speeches of the 20^th century, it catapulted Jordan – the first Southern Black woman elected to Congress – to national prominence.

But there’s another element of Jordan’s story that’s notoriously undercovered: her opposition to immigration policies that have failed Black Americans for centuries – and continue to hinder their ability to build wealth today.

With slavery abolished after the Civil War, Black Americans began accruing real wealth. After emancipation, the white-black wealth gap narrowed from 23-to-1 in 1870 to 11-to-1 in 1900. While still suffering from discrimination, Black Americans took on paying jobs, became business owners, and even purchased land.

Then the Progressive Era’s immigration boom began in earnest. Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million immigrants arrived at U.S. shores – destabilizing labor markets and particularly hurting Black workers.

Numerous Black civil rights and labor leaders, including A. Philip Randolph, endorsed efforts to slash immigration rates. Randolph correctly pointed out that excessive immigration “over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living.”

Congress ultimately listened and passed the Immigration Act of 1924 – which curtailed foreign migration. By dramatically tightening the labor market, the law helped shrink the earnings gap between Black men and white men by nearly 60% between 1940 and 1980.

It’s simple supply and demand. When there are fewer workers available, employers have to raise wages and provide better benefits to attract them.

The 1924 law certainly had flaws. It gave preference to prospective immigrants based on their country of origin, and strongly favored northern Europeans. Ultimately, the law’s discriminatory nature led Congress to repeal it in 1965.

But lawmakers threw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of creating a nondiscriminatory immigration system that protected American workers from cheap foreign labor, the reforms of the 1960s re-started mass migration. Black Americans have been paying a steep price ever since.

As Harvard economist George Borjas has shown, Black Americans are particularly disadvantaged by lax immigration policies because immigrants compete directly with Black workers for blue-collar jobs. Each “10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the Black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of Black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of Blacks by almost a full percentage point,” he and his colleagues concluded.

Of course, Black Americans aren’t the only ones harmed. Journalist David Leonhardt recently chronicled how American workers of all races have seen their wages decline thanks to the renewed tide of immigration that began in the 1960s.

He also elevates the forgotten perspective of Barbara Jordan.

Jordan chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, a bipartisan panel of experts tasked by President Clinton with offering immigration reform recommendations. The commission recommended that the United States pare down immigration to 550,000 people per year and eliminate low-skilled immigration altogether. Clinton initially endorsed the commission’s recommendations, but business lobbyists ultimately convinced Congress to not move forward with the reforms.

Since the Jordan Commission, too many policymakers have defended a system that imports millions of predominantly low-skilled immigrants, both legal and illegal, who depress wages for Black Americans.

Reducing immigration, just as Congress did a century ago, would give Black families a fair shot at the American dream.

Andre Barnes is HBCU Engagement Director for NumbersUSA. This piece originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle.

Source: How our immigration policies failed Black Americans