President Trump routinely boasts that unemployment rates for Black Americans are “at record lows.” That was true a few months ago — but now those rates are climbing again. Currently, 6.7% of Black Americans are out of work, up nearly a full percentage point from November.

This uptick is no coincidence — it’s directly tied to the huge number of foreign workers pouring into the country. In the past four months alone, Border Patrol caught more than 299,000 illegal aliens at the southern border. Due to “catch-and-release” laws, agents had to let many of them enter the interior United States, where they illegally took jobs in construction, housekeeping, and other blue-collar industries.

The federal government also doles out hundreds of thousands of temporary guest worker permits and roughly 1 million lifetime work permits each year.

These foreigners are mostly hardworking, decent people. But they’re taking jobs that would have otherwise gone to American workers — and Black Americans are especially hurt. The glut of foreign labor enables employers to hold down wages, making it harder for working-class Americans to bootstrap their way into the middle-class.

If President Trump wants to bring Black American unemployment levels back to record lows, he’ll need to halt the incoming flood of foreign workers.

The economy isn’t as strong as some people claim. The “official” unemployment rate of 3.8% doesn’t include people who can only find part-time jobs. It also doesn’t count workers who are so discouraged that they gave up looking for jobs entirely. Young Black Americans leave the labor force at substantially higher rates than their white counterparts.

When these part-time and discouraged workers are factored in, the unemployment rate nearly doubles to 7.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s even higher for Black Americans. And even this so-called real unemployment rate doesn’t count the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans — the majority of whom are minorities.

In short, tens of millions of Americans are still struggling to find jobs that enable them to afford rent and put food on the table. High levels of immigration make their lives even harder.

Many employers prefer to hire foreign laborers, especially illegal immigrants and temporary guest workers, since they’re easy to exploit. Nearly four in 10 illegal workers are sometimes paid less than the minimum wage. And more than eight in 10 are cheated out of overtime pay.

The excess competition from these foreign workers drives down wages and suppresses job opportunities for native-born Americans. According to economist George Borjas of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a “10 percent increase in the size of a skill group reduced the fraction of native-born Blacks in that group holding a job by 5.1 percentage points.”

Borjas also concludes that immigration “has its largest negative impact on the wage of native workers who lack a high school diploma,” a category in which both Black Americans are overrepresented. A recent National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report confirms that “native-born high school dropouts” are disproportionately harmed by immigration.

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Newsom should sign bill granting civilian oversight of sheriff’s departments Cracking down on illegal immigration and scaling back legal immigration would empower more U.S. citizens – especially Black Americans — to find jobs and bargain for better pay.

Helping these citizens isn’t just the morally right thing to do. It’s also good politics, particularly for President Trump and other Republicans who are unfairly accused of racism. The president ought to use the power of the bully pulpit to explain how Democrats’ support for amnesty, open borders, and guest worker programs disproportionately harms Black Americans.

Many Black Americans are still struggling to find decent jobs. Limiting the influx of foreign workers would ease their plight — and send unemployment rates back to record lows.

Kathleen Wells is the host of The Naked Truth Report, which airs every Sunday on AM 870 (Los Angeles/Salem radio).