Readers push back:
This is a red herring if I ever saw one. So we shouldn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform, then? Ridiculous. This feels a lot like bait-and-switch, divide-and-conquer Republican politics. Let’s let the minorities fight it out amongst each other.
If that’s an unjust characterization, I suggest that if you want to get serious about black unemployment, low wages, and incarceration, you have many other tools in your toolbox, such as minimum wage increases (perhaps indexing to inflation), radically changing the prison industrial complex (especially abolishing for-profit prisons – talk about moral bankruptcy), and funding better job retraining programs. Where do the funds come from? Start making corporations pay taxes again, for starters.
Also, I recently saw this forum on CSPAN, and I would appreciate it if you would give it a shout-out. Regardless of your opinions of Smiley and West, I think it’s undeniable that there’s a bipartisan agreement in Washington to ignore poverty as a public policy issue.
Another:
That Seeing Red AZ post on blacks and immigration reform was awful. In particular, it was loaded with three assumptions, all of which were highly questionable:
1) That increased immigration has a negative effect on the unemployment rate for people born in the US;
2) That the primary impact of immigration reform will be to increase the number of immigrants in the US;
3) That African-American voters are primarily focused on narrow economic self-interest rather than any kind of broad understanding of civil rights and equality.
On the first point, the argument that immigration takes jobs away from the country is one of those points that seems logical and therefore continues to hold currency among the public even though it has been repeatedly shown to be factually wrong. Indeed, according to the Immigration Policy Center, “the most recent economic research indicates that immigration produces a slight increase in wages for the majority of native-born workers” because immigrants are rarely directly competing for the same jobs, and because immigrants expand the economic pie and thus create more overall jobs. See also this piece extensively documenting the non-relationship between immigration and minority employment and wages.
On the second point, the most important question on immigration reform is how our society is going to treat the ~11 million people who are currently here without legal documentation. The current situation, in which many of these 11 million work under the table for below-market and sometimes below-legal minimum wages and conditions, is terrible not only for the immigrants themselves but also for the few native-born low skill workers who do actually compete with immigrants for jobs, as well as for anyone who is trying to organize low-skill labor. Getting these immigrants normal, legally recognized jobs is an essential step towards improving working conditions for all people who do the kinds of labor performed by immigrants. It may also be true that providing a pathway to legal status for immigrants will increase incentives for illegal immigration (not a bad thing!). But that view is far more speculative than the fairly clear gains that immigration reform would mean to working-class people, which is why the AFL-CIO has completely come around on reform.
The third point is perhaps more in a realm of speculative opinion, but honestly, I find it pretty offensive and kind of stupid to think that black people would look at situations such as the current dynamic in Arizona, where a white majority is imposing increasingly burdensome restrictions on a rising Latino population – many of which (such as racial profiling) are identical to some of the core historical injustices that black people have faced – and identify with the white majority.
Obviously whenever two ethnic groups are living next to each other in crowded cities and competing for attention from political leaders for their priorities there is going to be some tension, but the idea that blacks are gettable votes for Republicans on immigration reform strikes me as insane even before you consider the influence of President Obama on black public opinion.
Another:
You cite a 2006 paper by George Borjas and coauthors. But that was only one salvo in a long-running and contentious debate among labor economists. For an overview, see the section starting “A contentious debate has emerged over whether immigrants have an impact on the wages or employment levels of non-immigrants” on page 4 of this report [pdf]. For lots, lots more, Google “card borjas debate”.
The Dish 