Amnesty for illegal workers is not just a slap in the face to black Americans. It's an economic disaster. I see illegal immigration and the adverse impact that it has on the political empowerment of African Americans, and the impact it has on the job market. T. Willard Fair, President of the Urban League of Greater Miami, Fla.
Bret Stephens of The New York Times penned an op-ed breathtaking in its contempt for the American people. His basic argument is that "so-called Americans" must be replaced by immigrants if America is to survive.
An op-ed by Thomas Broadwater argues that blue-collar work visas "are boxing millions of minority citizens out of jobs."
Broadwater elaborates:
"The number of good-paying blue collar jobs is shrinking. Since 1980, America has lost more than 12 million manufacturing jobs to automation or offshoring. Wages have stagnated."
On Tuesday night, in his final State of the Union address, President Obama said that “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” While that statement may not be what is technically referred to as a political whopper, a la John McCain’s pronouncement in 2008 that “The fundamentals of the economy are strong;” or even Obama’s own promise that the 2009 stimulus bill would fund hundreds of “shovel-ready” projects, it is misleading, nonetheless.
One of the country's former top statewide elected African American officials is using his national syndicated column to contrast Black History Month with the President's insistence on flooding the labor market with more foreign labor.
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow, in a letter to President Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus, warns that “(g)ranting work authorization to millions of illegal immigrants will devastate the black community, which is already struggling in the wake of the recession.” He also highlights the adverse effects an executive amnesty would have on U.S.-born high-skilled STEM workers.
My commentary today in the Capitol Hill publication, Roll Call, addresses the meaning of Prof. Brat's defeat of U.S. House Majority Leader Cantor and the need for Congress to change the debate from HOW and HOW MUCH to increase immigration to WHETHER to increase or reduce the numbers. You may not be aware of the incredibly positive results for a large segment of our population when World War One suddenly cut off immigration a century ago. Take a look . . .
I hope House Republican leaders will surprise me and prove me wrong when they release their Immigration Principles that the news media have been hyping the last two weeks. Here are seven ethical principles that I believe should and can undergird all immigration policies.
Just in time for the national celebration of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., the U.S. Labor Department reported that the labor force participation rate of black American men is the lowest ever recorded. King, of course, was deeply concerned about justice for all economically marginalized Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity. But he would surely be especially appalled at the virtual abandonment of black men by our country's economic decisionmakers who claim the nation has a labor shortage that demands more foreign labor.
A new, non-partisan group based in Washington D.C., Americans4Work, is shedding some light on the impact that both legal and illegal immigration have on America's most vulnerable, especially minority groups, the disabled, and post-9/11 veterans. Earlier today, the group held its first public event at the National Press Club with Senator Jeff Sessions, former Rep. and Lt. Col. Allen West, and Temple University Law Prof. Jan Ting. While most of the discussion was spent on how to get jobless Americans back to work, the immigration issue was a recurring theme.
Summer Recess is over and Congress is now gearing up for a busy fall schedule. During the Congressional break, NumbersUSA activists attended over 400 town halls with nearly 150 lawmakers! Even though we dampened the momentum for amnesty during August, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.
One of the greatest contributors to the huge civil rights advances in the 1960s was the fact that the United States had a tight labor market that increasingly needed Black American workers, particularly in the South.
And a key reason for the tightness of the labor market was the dramatic reduction in annual immigration flows ever since 1921, according to historians of that era.
In a letter sent to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the Black American Leadership Alliance said that granting amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens would have a detrimental effect on Black Americans. The group told Rep. Ryan that the unemployment rate for Blacks in the United States is nearly double the national level and that amnesty would have a "disastrous effect" on all low-wage workers.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and Center for Immigration Studies fellow Jerry Kammer wrote a piece after Monday's march that focused on the civil right's aspect of illegal immigration. He wrote, "young blacks have been especially affected by job displacement as employers have hired millions of illegal immigrants." This theme was invoked in the speeches of four Black Leaders on Monday as Kammer recounts.
It was only after I finished speaking to the March for Jobs crowd in a park across the street from the Gang-of-Eight-controlled Senate that I realized I had failed in my little speech to use the most obvious issue of today: THE HEAT. What I saw at that moment was a crowd of Americans from all over the country who were taking on miserable, sweaty, dehydrating conditions as a sign of solidarity with everybody in this country who has no choice but take on those conditions as a regular part of their jobs making the lives of the rest of us more comfortable.
The Black American Leadership Alliance hosted a march through Washington D.C. on Monday, protesting the Senate-passed amnesty bill, S.744. Breitbart.com provided live webcasting of the event and estimated around 3,000 people attended. They heard nearly four hours of speeches by Black Alliance leaders and others, including Senators Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz and Representatives Steve King and Mo Brooks.
The march and rally focused on how amnesty and high immigration levels hurts low-skilled American workers and their wages.
A group of Black Leaders sent a letter to Congress on Monday warning them about the negative impacts the Gang of Eight's immigration bill will have on Black Americans. The group sent their letter to Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Senators from states with the highest levels of Black unemployment.
Three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have sent a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus urging them to oppose amnesty. In their letter, the Commissioners ask if there are currently enough jobs in the country for minorities and they say no.
Major media -- after ignoring the subject throughout the campaigns -- have finally been focusing on just how bad joblessness and poverty are for Black Americans.
Here in Washington, the Post ran a startling front page story over the weekend. And in the opinion section, it ran long-time open-borders columnist Michael Gerson's touching op-ed, "The ignored plight of black males."
NumbersUSA is stirring up a whirlwind of interest, gasping, attaboying and disgust with our national TV ad campaign asking why our government adds another million permanent foreign workers each year while more than 3 million Black Americans who want a full-time job can't find one. I drove up to Baltimore -- a stronghold of Black unemployment -- early this morning to do some TV interviews about why we are doing this.
An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit filed last week accuses a South Georgia farmer of discriminating against U.S. and black workers because of their race and national origin while giving better treatment to workers from Mexico. The suit alleges that the firm in 2009 let go the bulk of its U.S. workers but kept nearly all of its 370 workers from Mexico. The next year, lawyers say the company terminated the majority of its 233 U.S. workers, but it kept the vast majority of its 518 workers from Mexico.
Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it's the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.
CBS News recently reported some devastating statistics for Black Americans who are living with depression-era unemployment rates. Blacks are not the only ones hurting. Unemployment rates are high among almost every class of worker, especially Blacks, Latinos,and teenagers. CBS further reports that most graduating students don't have marketable skills. But the report ignored the federal government's failure to prevent U.S. employers from illegally displacing less-educated U.S. workers.
Many pro-amnesty advocates claim that "comprehensive immigration reform" is the "civil rights test of our generation."
NumbersUSA contents that there is little comparison between the struggle of descendants of American slaves to gain equal standing and the desire of illegal aliens to be rewarded for breaking immigration laws.
The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement hosted a hearing Tuesday morning called “Making Immigration Work for American Minorities.” While the hearing was likely designed to correspond with February’s Black History Month festivities, March 1 is better late than never because it was quite entertaining by Congressional hearing standards.
When Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838, he soon discovered that recently arrived immigrants were nearly as tenacious as slavemasters and bounty hunters in trying to keep a black man from freely competing in the labor markets of the North. In this week of Martin Luther King's birthday, let's take a look at how mass immigration that depresses economic opportunity for today's Black Underclass was doing the same thing for Free Blacks BEFORE the Civil War. . . .
Martin Luther King Jr.'s crusade for economic justice was not limited to poor Black Americans. His work, like the work of NumbersUSA today, was aimed at helping all vulnerable Americans of any race or national origin. But King recognized that historic circumstances had left a large, disproportionate share of Black Americans in an economic underclass. I believe that Americans whose ancestors were slaves have been the greatest victims of the renewal of mass immigration that has occurred since King's assassination in 1968. Here is a brief summary of my assessment . . .
The Shirley Sherrod episode got a lot of journalists and politicians thinking this last week about how too many people far too quickly and easily toss around charges of racism without knowing the facts or the context. I found Pres. Obama's comment on ABC to be an excellent quote to offer back to the next pro-amnesty blogger, religious figure or politician who charges racism against our immigration-reduction movement or individuals within it.
Terry Anderson, Champion for Black Americans who favor lower immigration levels, spoke at the Phoenix Rising Rally on June 5, 2010 to show his support for Arizona's immigration enforcement law.
Longtime radio host and Immigration Champion Terry Anderson died on Wednesday. Anderson was known for voicing his opinion on the negative impacts that America's current immigration system has on Black Americans. He was highly critical of the Bush and Obama Administrations and regularly had Immigration Champions such as Former Rep. Tom Tancredo and Rep. Brian Bilbray on his radio program. Terry died of pancreatic cancer.
Terry Anderson, who called himself the Prisoner of South Central (Los Angeles) died earlier today, and the silence is already deafening. When blue-collar Black Americans across the nation began to lose control of their neighborhoods, their occupations, their schools and their livelihoods because of immigration during the 1990s, Terry -- above all others -- refused to be silent. For more than 15 years, nobody was a more outspoken champion of the cause of Black Americans against the unfair competition of immigration.
A new study conducted by an LSU sociology professor and doctoral student finds that immigration, specifically the influx of Latino workers, increases unemployment and violence in Black communities. The study concludes that an increase in low-skill workers, displaces low-skill Black workers resulting in more violence.
Yes, we were earnest products of the '60s college scene. My wife Shirley and I spent a good part of our first date in January 1967 revealing our respective concerns about discrimination against Black Americans. The processional that I wrote for our wedding in 1970 included lyrics pledging our marriage to fighting the race hatred that so permeated our society at that time. So on this our 40th Wedding Anniversary weekend, we found ourselves marveling at how our decades of reasonably faithful commitment to our social consciousness vows are now subject to a nationally concerted campaign of lies by open-border advocates in an effort to undermine the legitimacy of NumbersUSA's grassroots mobilization efforts. But such is the nature of groups and websites willing to wield any convenient lie and smear that seems to buttress their argument.
There is ample blame to be laid at the White House door, but the 43 members of the CBC who represent largely black constituencies also bear a large share of the responsibility. While some 8 million existing U.S. jobs are estimated to be held by illegal aliens, the CBC, like Mr. Obama, has consistently opposed tough enforcement of laws against employing illegal aliens. Many of the jobs filled by illegal aliens could be filled by black Americans, especially the huge cohort of black youth who are neither in school nor part of the labor force.
Well-funded open-borders groups send hecklers to call me a "white supremacist" every place I speak. But I was still a little surprised when I spoke to a Black grassroots group recently to have all the African Americans there also accused. It now looks like pro-amnesty groups are willing to label as racist anybody who advocates for less immigration.
Acknowledging that unemployment among Black Americans is agonizingly high, Pres. Obama says it would be inappropriate to do anything aimed just at Blacks. He says he must help Blacks with actions that also help other Americans and that he continues to look for those solutions. Like all people blinded by ideology, Mr. Obama is his own worst enemy in not seeing that reducing overall immigration is in fact a magic solution that meets all his criteria.
I was dining in downtown Boston with a long-time acquaintance of Teddy Kennedy at the very time the Senator died a week ago. We had discussed what had caused Kennedy to pursue immigration policies that so fundamentally changed America. When I awoke the next morning to the Massachusetts TV stations doing their eulogies, I decided to wait until after burial to share my thoughts. . . .
Hundreds of unemployed Black Americans are getting jobs in Raeford, N.C. because enforcement is driving out illegal workers. But that is a bad -- even evil -- thing, according to religious leaders like the ones scheduled to go to the White House on Thursday to help decide how to pass an amnesty for illegal aliens this next year. I don't really think these religious leaders hate the Black American underclass. But they HAVE abandoned it.
Forty years ago this morning, I was visiting with Milton Berle in his hotel room near Grand Rapids, Michigan, sharing our reactions to watching the moon landing in the middle of the night. That evening, we met again over a giant bowl of potato salad at a backyard picnic as Congressman Gerald Ford dipped and recounted his call from Pres. Nixon soon after the moon walk.
In my blog from Thursday, June 18, I looked at the historical views of black Americans towards massive immigration of low-skilled labor. For today’s African-Americans regarding illegal immigration, there seems to be a divergence between the leadership and the rank-and-file. Terry Anderson, a radio host in Los Angeles, airs his views in a two part video interview that is posted on the CAPS website. The link was sent to me by a NumbersUSA member who wrote, “Everyone at NumbersUSA needs to see these radio interviews.”
Typically, my highly visible calls last week to reduce immigration for the sake of the U.S. environment have been met by attempts to say that my/our environmental concerns are just cloaks to cover up true racist motives. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to say a few things about NumbersUSA's position on race, and also to appeal to all readers to challenge these words of false witness wherever you encounter them on the internet.
A new half-hour video assembles some two dozen of the nation's foremost leaders in protecting American workers. The video gives them a soapbox to explain how elected leaders use high immigration to drive down the wages of and throw out of work many of the country's most vulnerable citizens. Watch a six-minute trailer or go directly to the full video. Use it in programs for civic clubs, unions, veterans groups and churches.
Black laborers in the construction industry used to be the norm, but with the increased migration of Latin Americans, the construction industry slowly became more Latino. Washington D.C. based concrete construction firm Miller & Long once employed a workforce that was 80 percent black, but as those black laborers slowly retired, they were replaced with Latinos, which now make up 71 percent of the company's workers.
"Though blacks have long worried that the country’s growing foreign-born population, especially its swelling rolls of illegal immigrants, harmed their economic prospects, they have also followed their political leadership in backing liberal immigration policies.
"Among students at 28 top U.S. universities, the representation of black students of first- and second-generation immigrant origin (27 percent) was about twice their representation in the national population of blacks their age (13 percent). Within the Ivy League, immigrant-origin students made up 41 percent of black freshmen..." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/30/AR2007043000106.html
The Associated Press; April 30, 2007
"Black American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, two Harvard University professors, have said that white educators are skirting long-held missions to resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans by enrolling immigrants who look like them..." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/05/AR2007030501296.html
The Washington Post; March 6, 2007
"For the first time since significant numbers of Latinos began arriving in Stillmore in the late 1990s, the plant's processing lines were made up predominantly of African-Americans..." http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07017/754517-28.stm
The Wall Street Journal via Pittsburgh Post Gazette; January 17, 2007
