Our staff just finished its annual NumbersUSA Martin Luther King Jr. holiday lunch. We recounted our staff field trip last year to the home of the 19th Century's greatest civil rights leader -- Frederick Douglass. (That's me, Roy Beck, standing next to the Douglass statue in the photo to the right.)
For those of us at NumbersUSA, Douglass is even more than a civil rights icon. He was an honorable and powerful critic of how the high immigration of his time disadvantqaged the country's vulnerable workers -- of all races and ethnicities.
In his economic critique of mass immigration, Douglass was not significantly different from most of the great African-American leaders of the 20th century, including King, who saw indiscriminant mass immigration as undermining economic opportunities.
SEN. SESSIONS' IMMIGRATION ADVOCACY A TRADITIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS APPROACH
Thus, it was confounding just last week to see so many critics try to brand Sen. Jeff Sessions' immigration-reduction leadership as somehow a sign of hostility to civil rights, when his immigration stance is so similar to giants of the country's civil rights movement.
Sessions for more than a decade has been the most eloquent and persistent voice in Congress for that traditional civil rights argument that high levels of immigration create a bloated labor force that allows businesses and politicians to de-value the lives of the country's poorest citizens.
Booker T. Washington, who immediately followed Douglass as one of the nation's top African-American leaders, predicted that the nation would finally give full respect to its Black citizens when those citizens' labor was needed. And that's what happened after immigration numbers were slashed in the 1920s. Between then and the 1960s, the great Black middle class was created as Black income rose faster than for other Americans for the only time in our history. That culminated in the passage of the national civil rights laws of the 1960s. But Congress then started up mass immigration again, and with it the de-valuing of large portions of our population again.
Jeff Sessions has been trying to re-create the economic opportunities of that low-immigration era. He has sought a tight labor market that would engender respect and the need for the labor of the Black, Hispanic and White Americans with less education who have been virtually abandoned in recent decades.
THE VIEW FROM THE TOP OF DOUGLASS' HILL SAW NEED FOR FEWER FOREIGN WORKERS
A runaway slave who became a national abolitionist leader due to the popularity and influence of his books, Douglass became a confidant of Pres. Lincoln. Over the next three decades, he held high-ranking federal offices -- including U.S. Marshal for D.C. and Consul General to Haiti -- under five presidents.
His study and dining room were a center of African-American and women's suffrage intellectual and political pursuit. His front porch high atop a hill in Southeast Washington DC offered his guests a spectacular panorama below of the Anacostia River and the whole sweep of federal buildings that he insisted must serve all Americans.
I wrote a great deal about Douglass in my W.W. Norton & Co. book, "The Case Against Immigration." Here is a short excerpt:
Douglass remained until his death in 1895 an uncompromising proponent of equal economic opportunities for Black Americans. He towered over all other Americans in his advocacy of a colorblind, unified national society, and contended regularly with the pressures from immigration to drive Black Americans out of the mainstream.
Douglass escaped to New York in 1838, then moved to Massachusetts. But as immigration continued to increase, the conditions for free Black Americans in the North grew worse and slavery in the South was administered more harshly. Douglass would write:
"The old employments by which we have heretofore gained our livelihood are gradually, and it may be inevitably, passing into other hands. Every hour sees the Black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place."
He could have been writing about today. Thankfully, we are on the cusp of having immigration policies administered by Jeff Sessions and others like him. And that makes this civil rights holiday one of the most optimistic in years.
[When you next come to Washington, do something that none of your friends have and visit the National Historic Site of Douglass' home. Here's the website: https://www.nps.gov/frdo/index.htm. If in a car, you drive down South Capitol Street from the Capitol past the Nationals baseball stadium, immediately cross the Anacostia bridge and then wind your way up the hill. Visit the visitor center at the parking lot and then climb the steps up to the house. You'll get great history and one of the best views in Washington.]
ROY BECK is Founder & President of NumbersUSA
