The massive migration of illegal immigrants into the United States is overwhelming border agents and relief agencies, but U.S. Census Bureau data show it’s black Americans who are paying the biggest price.
A Census report published last fall shows the median income for “Non Citizens” eclipses black Americans by more than $9,000, and Hispanics in general earned nearly $10,000 a year more than blacks in 2017, RedState reports.
The Census data show the median black income came to $40,258 in 2017, while the same figure for “Not a citizen” totaled $49,739. The median income for Hispanics of any race was $50,486.
Liberals including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to frame the crisis from the more than 1 million illegal immigrants this year as a race issue, alleging Trump’s push for border security is part of a plan to “make America white again.”
But the Los Angeles Times noted last year the allegations of racist intentions “ignore the reality that the group most likely to benefit from a tougher approach to immigration enforcement is young black men, who often compete with recent immigrants for low-skilled jobs.”
The Times pointed to a Chicago area bakery as an example of how the dynamic plays out in real life. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 800 illegal immigrants from Mexico who worked at the Cloverhill Bakery in 2017, which forced the business, a Swiss food company that supplies buns to McDonald’s, to hire new workers at $14 per hour – $4 more an hour than what it paid illegal immigrants.
The vast majority of the new hires – and estimated 80 to 90 percent – were black.
Regardless, a broader trend of blacks losing jobs to illegal and legal immigrants continues and will likely intensify along with the influx at the southern border.
“The labor force participation rate for adult black men has declined steadily since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ushered in a new era of mass immigration. In 1973, the rate was 79%. It is now at 68%, and the Bureau of Labor projects that it will decline to 61% by 2026,” the Times reports.
It’s not rocket science, but the impact illegal immigration has on the black community is well documented in academia, from a 2007 Harvard University study that attributed a decline in employment among black high school dropouts to immigration surges, to a 2010 Cornell University study on the social effects of immigration that found “no racial or ethnic group has benefited less or been harmed more than the nation’s African American community.”
Trump’s focus on securing the nation’s border and insistence on fixing legal loopholes driving the problem speaks directly to black Americans who understand the facts.
“A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that African Americans favor reducing legal immigration more than any other demographic group: 85% want less than the million-plus we allow on an annual basis, and 54% opted for the most stringent choices offered – 250,000 immigrants per year or less, or none at all,” the Times reported last year, referring to a January 2018 survey.
Trump won the largest share of the black vote of any Republican candidate in recent history when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 with about 8 percent black support, and the Trump 2020 campaign is optimistic it can “more than quadruple that number next year,” Real Clear Politics reports.
Kamilah Prince, the Republican National Committee’s director of African American engagement, told the news site record low unemployment for black workers, a raging economy, support for historically black colleges and Trump’s landmark criminal justice reforms are all great accomplishments.
Prince argues 2020 will come down to “four more years of record-setting growth and opportunities for a return to Democrat policies that have failed the black community in the past.”
Trump 2020 Campaign Manager Brad Parscale told RCP that research shows “we notice a significant uptick in support” among black voters when they learn about the president’s landmark criminal justice reforms.
“Specifically, the Trump team recorded support for the president in the ‘low double digits’ while knocking on the doors of 1,200 black households,” RCP reports. “When those same households were told about criminal justice reform, things changed. According to Parscale, support jumped to nearly 38%.”
Experts told RCP Trump need only improve on the 8 percent support from 2016 to ensure re-election.
“At the end of the day, Democrats know this is the one voter base they cannot afford to have fractionalized,” said Ken Blackwell, former Republican mayor of Cincinnati and Ohio secretary of state. “We know they have to get a 93%-7% split, but a win for us, a technical knockout for us, would be something like 88%-12%.”
“Democrats can’t win unless they get Obama levels of black turnout,” GOP strategist Ed Rollins added. “Unless they can get back to those levels, it makes it awful hard for them to win the White House.”
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