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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 06, 2006 - 11:23 am: | 
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Source: The Chicago Defender
RON WALTERS: Blacks and the Immigration Blues
by Ron Walters, NNPA Columnist
April 6, 2006
Okay, I admit that we have an attitude when it comes to undignified, low-wage work, because we did that for centuries in this country. But every time it has looked like the law and the economic opportunities would aligned to make possible the mobility necessary to reach the middle class, we have faced a new wave of entrants into the American labor market that challenged our access to the lowest rung of the ladder.
Frederick Douglass first referred to the difficulty Blacks faced when the tide of Irish and Italian immigration descended upon America in the latter 19th Century and Marcus Garvey did the same in the early 20th Century. Although Blacks cheered the Chinese exclusion act of 1920, later, Vietnamese, who had been American allies in that war, flooded into the country, enjoying what many Blacks felt was priority access to social goods that they could not achieve.
Today, Blacks are not only in competition with those abroad - workers in India, China, Japan, Malaysia, and Latin America, they now face serious competition for jobs from recent large scale Hispanic immigration that again threatens their fragile position in the labor force.
Currently, Blacks have great difficulty obtaining jobs in the construction, restaurant, hotel, landscape, meat-packing and other industries. But what has reemerged is the old rationale used by businesses: Blacks are too late for work, too lazy, too inefficient, too proud to accept menial labor paying lower wages. So, it is justified to give jobs to others that they won't take.
Indeed this theme was uttered by George Bush to rationalize his guest worker program, and Mexican President Vicente Fox picked it up and specifically referred to Blacks, causing an equally justified response by Black civil rights leaders. Although we did not come out of the fields as slave hands only to go back into the fields for modern slave wages, many of these jobs that immigrants hold are not in agriculture and as such are jobs that Black people want, need and can do.
In fact, a recent five-year study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an admittedly anti-immigration shop, found that in the meat-packing and janitorial jobs, Americans with and without high school degree have suffered recent decline in labor force participation rates. Moreover, this occurs at a time when Black economists, such as William Rogers of Rutgers, have pointed to the serious damage that the weak labor force has had on Black employment.
But while Blacks generally approve of immigration, a 1996 Roper poll found that where 83 percent of Americans felt the level should be lowered, 73 percent of Blacks felt that way.
Nevertheless, there is a debate about how much immigration has hurt Black employment and Blacks themselves are either confused by this, or ignore it altogether, because we are also party to the tradition of a liberal philosophy that tends not to vilify the victim and not to scapegoat those who rightfully take advantages of the opportunities for human advancement that are provided to then and to promote the advancement of opportunity for the disadvantaged.
While we should be forthright about the fact that immigration has historically brought with it vigorous competition for entry level jobs and the same thing is occurring now, we should also avoid scapegoating the entrants.
The immigrants are not the problem, it is the system that allows them to enter the country, utilizes their labor and fails to protect American citizens, most especially vulnerable populations such as Blacks. This is especially true of pro-business administrations, both Democratic and Republican that have lined up for corporate donations and were then were eager to build a system that would service their needs for access to low wage labor, both here and abroad.
While the debate now rages over various versions of 'comprehensive immigration reform,' no bill ñ not even that one proposed by Ted Kennedy ñ contains a challenge to the notion that immigrants do jobs that Americans won't do, at the same time Americans do most of the dirty work anyway.
These proposals should contain a plan to test that assumption by including a provision that would require employers to give American citizens the first right of refusal to jobs, after which they can be made available to legal immigrants.
This provision should be monitored by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor through surveys and inspectors ñ all of which would require added funding.
Most employers already understand that it is illegal to hire undocumented workers, but say that it is too expensive to monitor this problem, and there is no government pressure.
So, the burden of monitoring job access for American citizens should shift to government, rather than allowing the false rhetoric to undergird leaky policy.
Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Institute, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest books are: White Nationalism, Black Interests (Wayne State University Press) and Freedom is Not Enough, (Rowman and Littlefield ).
Minnie E Miller
Author of "Catharsis" and "The Seduction of Mr. Bradley."
www.millerscribs.com
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