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.
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 forty 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.”