Trump's Bid to Pit Black and Brown Workers Against Each Other

President Trump has resurrected an old canard in his effort to sell a new effort to restrict immigration into the United States. The legislation he backs, he said at a White House ceremony, was necessary in part to protect "minority workers competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals" under the current immigration system.

This theme is a hardy perennial in right-wing media and think-tank reports, often featuring members of a small but persistent cadre of conservative black people willing to be the face of the pernicious idea that in order to boost the fortunes of African Americans, we have to keep new immigrants out of the country.

This notion keeps getting debunked, but Trump trotted it out anyway as his administration launches key assaults against the core concerns of African-American people.

This comes the same week as news reports that the Justice Department is gearing up a new assault on affirmative action programs at colleges, based on the lie that these programs discriminate against white and Asian college applicants.

Career civil-rights lawyers in the Justice Department are so aghast at the idea that their agency's efforts are being redirected from addressing the continuing effects of structural racism that Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to use political appointees and outside lawyers to lead the effort.

Remember that this pronouncement also is in the shadow of a speech Trump gave before police officers in Long Island, New York, in which he encouraged police officers to rough up criminal suspects.

"[W]hen you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon — you just see them thrown in, rough — I said, please don’t be too nice," Trump told the assembly of law enforcement officers.

Even people in his own administration denounced the speech as inappropriate, as did prominent police chiefs. Later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Trump's comment as a joke.

But in African-American communities around the country, where the drumbeat of stories of police officers using clearly unwarranted deadly force against African Americans continues to reverberate, no one was laughing.

Vice senior editor Wilbert Cooper convincingly took on the black-people-harmed-by-immigration myth in a 2016 essay. Not only is it false that immigration of lower-skilled people harms African-American employment prospects, he wrote that "counter to what Trump and others contend, there's evidence that immigration can actually help low-skilled blacks get back to work."

Denver University economist Jack Strauss analyzed a wide breadth of data from metropolitan areas across the US in 2013 to determine whether blacks in particular lose out when it comes to immigration. He found there to be a "one-way causation from increased immigration including Latinos to higher black wages and lower poverty." In other words, immigration is good for black workers. According to Strauss's summary of his findings, a "1 percent rise in Latino immigration contributes to a 1.4 percent increase in employment rates among African Americans," and "for every 1 percent increase in a city's share of Latinos, African median and mean wages increase by 3 percent."

The reality is, as Cooper writes, cities like Cleveland and Detroit are working to attract immigrants, because of the impact immigrants have on the overall economic vitality of the communities they make their home.

Jobs Tell The Story

On Friday, the federal government will release an updated picture of the nation's employment situation. The previous report, covering June, showed that the nation's unemployment rate was 4.4 percent, and African-American unemployment was 7.1 percent, down significantly from 8.8 percent in June 2016.

The significant decrease in black unemployment is in itself a direct rebuke to the idea that drastic measures to restrict immigration are necessary to lower unemployment rates in African-American communities.

What that progress affirms that economic growth combined with economic justice and fairness is essential to closing the gaps between black, brown and white employment prospects.

What The Nation Needs

What the nation needs is not an assault on immigration, but an assault on the effects of structural racism and economic inequality. Instead of dismantling affirmative action, we need investments in schooling for African-American children that start at preschool – and before.

We need to reinvest in communities that have been left behind by the free-market idolatry of too many state governments and, now, the federal government itself. We need every worker to have a living wage and access to affordable housing.

Above all, we need to end the assaults on the fundamental dignity of African-American people – from the coded reference to "thugs" who need to be roughed up by police to the active exalting by White House officials of the nostrums of white nationalism.

Thanks but no thanks, President Trump. The overwhelming majority of African Americans don't want your faux paternalism at the expense of our immigrant brothers and sisters.