Bacon's Rebellion

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With Illegal Immigration, Invoking Black Workers is a Red Herring

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Monday’s Washington Times featured an article titled “Blacks See Threat from Hispanic Illegal Aliens.” In the piece, the writer notes that “Blacks in the [Washington, DC] region are joining Minuteman militia groups opposed to illegal Hispanic aliens working in the United States, saying they take jobs from blacks and piggyback off the strides made during the civil rights movement.” This article highlights an emerging argument in the illegal immigration dust-up that holds that black workers are disproportionately affected by undocumented labor. An underlying presumption of this argument seems to be that in the absence of such illegal labor, low-income and poor black workers would have greater employment opportunities. However, that premise has several flaws which must be explored, though disproving them is another matter.

First, this argument assumes that the jobs that illegals work were previously available in the workforce and that black workers actually held such jobs. While it is true that black workers have represented a significant portion of the lower end of the labor market, their current disconnection from the workforce cannot simply be attributed to the rise in undocumented work. What is often overlooked is that the loss of black labor-force participation is heavily related to globalization and suburbanization as unskilled and semi-skilled work opportunities left urban centers and headed to the suburbs and exurbs. Additionally, the forces of global commerce have taken such jobs offshore. Add to that the increasing rates of incarceration of young black males, and three much stronger factors emerge as to the origins of black worker distress.

Second, many of the stereotypical jobs that illegals work – such as landscaping, maintenance, janitorial, and food services – are available due to the economic growth and real estate boom that has been in effect since the mid-1990s. Essentially, many of these jobs did not exist in previous economic periods. The illegal work was basically a labor market innovation, in a perverse sense. The one area in which an argument about direct replacement of black workers by illegals could be promulgated is in the arena of farm-work and other agricultural fields. These jobs are the ones that brought together the strange bedfellows of Vicente Fox and Louis Farrakhan who both held that black workers do not want the jobs that illegals perform. Finally, research has shown that the misfortune of black workers, particularly males, in the workforce is due to their skills and educational deficiencies.

This is not a matter of victim-blaming as much as it is offering alternative possibilities against the overly-simplistic “they’re taking our jobs” argument that some commentators have used to stir up black resentment of illegal immigrants. While there may indeed be some linkage between the economic plight of low-income blacks and the rise in undocumented workers – a mind greater than this writer’s will have to investigate that matter – attempts to cast this battle in black-brown terms will only serve to increase divisiveness and stir up conflicts that are not useful for Americans of any color.

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6 responses to “With Illegal Immigration, Invoking Black Workers is a Red Herring”

  1. James Atticus Bowden Avatar
    James Atticus Bowden

    “Red and yellow, black and white, we are equal in His sight.”

    Racial politics in any form are divisive.

    The fact that illegals depress wages for the lowest paid workers is economics 101. If anyone would like to the see the minimum wage raised, then stop the illegal alien invasion. The minimum wage will rise without government interference and without a loss of jobs.

  2. Vivian J. Paige Avatar
    Vivian J. Paige

    This is more an issue of playing the race card than anything else. Just like abortion, just like gay marriage – anything that can be done to try to separate blacks from the Democratic party is going to be given a shot.

  3. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Conaway, you make some valid points about the reasons about the disconnect between blacks and the labor force. But then you assert the following:

    “Many of the stereotypical jobs that illegals work – such as landscaping, maintenance, janitorial, and food services – are available due to the economic growth and real estate boom that has been in effect since the mid-1990s.”

    Janitors an innovation of the 1990s? Food services an innovation of the 1990s? Landscaping an innovation of the 1990s? I’ve been around 53 years, and I can tell you that those kinds of jobs have been around a lot longer than since the 1990s, and I can tell you that they employed a lot of black people.

    Do you have any evidence to back up that particular claim?

    As for your comments about the impact of globalization and the migration of jobs to the suburbs, both widely accepted. In those instances, I would concur with your observations. But that raises another interesting question. Why haven’t blacks followed the job opportunities to the suburbs as Hispanics have done?

  4. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Maybe because the Hispanics are more likely to be conservative and Republican-leaning? If the Pubs don’t come up with a plan the hispanics like, that fact could change, much to the Pubs remorse.

  5. SouthoftheJames.com Avatar
    SouthoftheJames.com

    Jim, while it is true that those jobs employed a lot of black people (and existed) in the past, over the past decade, the opportunities for such work have increased as our society has become more affluent and real estate (residential/commercial) more suburban and dispersed. This has created a new economy. It’s not as if all of a sudden all the black guys were sent home from a worksite out in (pick the county) and replaced by a crew of illegals. If someone could make the case that blacks are being laid off, let go, or otherwise seeing their labor directly substituted with illegal labor, that would be one thing.

    The reasons that are hypothesized as to why blacks haven’t followed jobs in to the suburbs are complex. Some of it is related to where blacks are concentrated versus where Hispanics are, and some of it is also related to the nature of the work and how workers find that work. Honestly, I don’t have the answer. But, I do know that the illegal economy has basically shifted the labor market dynamics in terms of the wage floors and methods for finding needed labor. Thus, if someone wants to make the logical case that: 1. black workers are disproportinately poor or low-wage, 2. low-wage and poor workers are disproportiantely affected by undocumented labor, thus 3. black workers are hurt by undocumented labor, I could see that argument. But, for activists and others to simply say they are taking “our” jobs is overly simplistic because the black underclass is often not in the measured laborforce to beging with (or is engaged in illegal or informal activity).

    However, I will keep trolling for research and mining the data to see what conclusions can be drawn and to back up my claims.

  6. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    There is a March 2006 Backgrounder by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies in DC that has some interesting figures relating to this topic. CIS can be contacted at center@cis.org.

    Between March 2000-March 2005 only 9% of the net incease in jobs for adults (18-64) went to natives, who actually accounted for 61% of the net increase of population in that age group.

    In the same time frame the number of adult immigrants (legal & illegal) in the labor force with a high school degree or less increased by about 1.6 million and the unemployment among less educated natives increased by about 1 million. The number of the less educated natives who left the work force (not counted as unemployed) increased by 1.5 million. This decline doesn’t seem to be parents staying home with children, retirements, or college attendance.

    States with the largest increase in immigration saw larger declines in adult natives working. Occupations with the most new immigrants showed native unemployment at 10% on average.

    Same time frame, the percent of adult natives without a high school education in the labor force fell from 59% to 56%; those with only a HS degree fell from 78% to 75%.

    The labor force participation of native born teenagers (15-17) fell from 30% in 2000 to 24% in 2005.

    Since wage growth for less educated natives lags behind that for better educated workers, it is hard to see a shortage in such workers. {My own observation on this specific issue is that there wouldn’t be the day laborers standing on street corners looking – often unsuccessfully – for work if there was a shortage of such workers. They’d have jobs.}
    ############

    The low unemployment rate in the US today sort of confuses the issue: it doesn’t reflect those who have stopped looking or who are under-employed. Nor does it reflect young men who look for jobs but haven’t been employed in the traditional sense at all. The EMPLOYMENT rate for young men without college, especially young black men, is the lowest it has been in decades.

    I find it hard to see how the vast number of less educated immigrants could NOT have affected the job prospects of less educated natives. To the extent that black workers are disproportionally represented in this group, they would be affected to a larger degree, it would seem.

    As an aside, the increase in H-1B’s and L-1’s seems to have decreased the percentage of women in IT related professions (from 41% in 1996 to 32.4% in 2004) because most IT related H-1B and L-1 workers are male.

    Immigration is a very complex issue.

    D Flinchum

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