Approved ~ MJM
In 1853, Frederick Douglass wrote of cities in the North:
Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place.
With only a handful of interruptions, black workers have faced the same situation for nearly two centuries — mass immigration of foreigners whom employers prefer to black workers, pushing them to the back of the hiring line.
As it happens, “Back of the Hiring Line” is the title of a new book by Roy Beck, president of Numbers USA, the premier citizen-action group working to reduce immigration. The book traces, as its subtitle promises, “a 200-year history of immigration surges, employer bias, and depression of black wealth.”
In relating that history, Beck describes three brief flowerings of opportunity for black Americans that came with interruptions in immigration.
First, the years immediately following abolition, before the start of the Great Wave; then, when World War I cut off travel from Europe; and finally, the four decades or so after the 1924 immigration-restriction law.
But each case was a false spring, snuffed out by the resumption of mass immigration.
Laws limits immigs
Beck’s core message is that a tight labor market is the most practical means to improve the conditions of all marginalized Americans, non-college-educated black workers most of all. The brief immigration pause forced by World War I was “proof of concept,” with the absence of European immigrant workers sparking a huge northward migration of black southerners.
With mass immigration surging back as shipping lanes reopened after the war, Congress reduced the flow via the Immigration Act of 1924. Given that the law was partly shaped by the racialist hokum that was the style at the time, it is ironic that it became the single greatest engine of black progress in American history.
Continued…
