I'm excited to share with you news of the release on Amazon of NumbersUSA's new book, BACK OF THE HIRING LINE: A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, And Depression Of Black Wealth, by NumbersUSA President Roy Beck.
The book is especially relevant as the Senate prepares to consider the House-passed Budget Reconciliation bill that includes the largest amnesty in U.S. history. The book makes it clear that flooding the job market with millions of additional foreign workers will only create more inequality and push many African Americans further down the lower rungs of the jobs ladders.
The book is available for purchase in either paperback, Kindle or audiobook on Amazon or through links on this page: backofthehiringline.com
BACK OF THE HIRING LINE reveals an aspect of U.S. immigration history that is largely unknown or ignored: the little-told stories of the struggles of freed slaves and their descendants to climb job ladders in the eras of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Barbara Jordan, and other African American leaders who advocated tight-labor migration policies. It is a history of bitter disappointments and, occasionally, of great hope.
Although you likely know more of this history than most, I expect you will, as I did, learn a lot from the book while also finding it engaging and compelling. As one reviewer on Amazon notes,
For many years I have realized that mass immigration is bad for Black Americans (and poor Americans in general). But Roy Beck's magnificent, comprehensive book fills in so many important details that I was unaware of."
As Roy writes later in the book,
Several times since the first few paragraphs of this book, I have cautioned that there are many factors creating the huge chasms of economic disparity in this country. While immigration policy has been one of the most important factors in the ups and downs of the fortunes of the descendants of slavery, it has not always been the most important.
"My assertion, though, is that immigration policy -- of all factors that contribute to economic inequality in the United States -- is the simplest to change for the quickest results."
Considered against the backdrop of the current national reckoning on race, the book establishes with great credibility that supporters of lower immigration levels truly stand on solid and high anti-racist moral ground in our efforts to reduce annual immigration numbers. Roy writes:
It was not Americans' individual immigrant parents, grandparents or great-grandparents who have been the principal culprit for much of the last 200 years. Rather, it has been the system of policies that allowed immigration numbers to spike above a beneficial and sustainable level.
"When those spikes occurred, the arc of American history bent dramatically away from justice for the families of freed slaves and their descendants -- regardless of the race or origin of the new immigrants."
I encourage you to ORDER A COPY TODAY and see for yourself. If you find it as meaningful as I did, please leave a comment on Amazon to let others know (and give a rating). Reviews such as the following from Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist and author Jerry Kammer are useful in encouraging others to take a look and learn more:
". . . artful story-telling in an extensive, well-documented, and powerful indictment of our governmental and societal failure to protect fundamental national interests involving Black Americans."
NumbersUSA has always sought to provide a civil forum for Americans of all political and ethnic backgrounds to discuss federal immigration policy. BACK OF THE HIRING LINE is written in that vein. As such, it is poised to reposition the immigration debate and to boldly engage the center of the country's political culture. I hope you will enjoy it, learn from it, and find it a useful tool in changing the way the issue is looked at.
By ANNE MANETAS, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF NUMBERSUSA
