With Illegal Immigration, Invoking Black Workers is a Red Herring

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.