Decades of data behind Trump's claims on illegal immigration and 'black jobs', experts say

The corporate media recently folded arms to dispel Donald Trump's claim that illegal immigration hurts “black jobs,” but experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the former president is right about the problem that is all too real.

Trump said during a question and answer with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) that “from the border there are millions and millions of people who are doing black work”. seconds to Politico, with the comments igniting a bevy of corporate media critics points of salewith one going so far as to say that “black jobs” do not exist and others that depend on experts to characterize the affirmation like “not true”. However, the reality is that immigration has a depressing effect on wages and employment, and experts point out how illegal immigration has disproportionately affected the industries and localities where black Americans often work.

Immigration has been a driver of black unemployment for “over 200 years.” Andre Barnes, NumbersUSA director of historically black colleges and universities engagement, told the DCNF.

“During the First World War immigration stopped and suddenly the factories in the North couldn't get enough people to work, so where did they go for their labor supply? black Americans.” Barnes told the DCNF. “We had the Immigration Act of 1924, and it reduced immigration from 700,000 to less than 200,000 per year, and the level remained at less than 200,000 per year for more than four years. And what did we see during that time period? You have seen an increase in black employment. We saw an increase in black economic power.”

In response to those who doubt the effects of immigration on black employment, Barnes gave the example of a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, which lost 1,500 immigrant workers after a raid by 'Immigration and Customs Enforcement. seconds in the New York Times in 2008. After the strikes, the factory saw its proportion of black workers jump from 20% to 60%.

“When we talk about black jobs, we're talking about these situations here,” Barnes said. “We're talking about the meatpacking jobs that disappeared between the 90s and the early 2010s that went from majority black to majority Hispanic. That's what people need to talk about when they talk about black jobs.”

In fiscal year 2023, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had more than 2 million encounters at the southern border, seconds to CBP data. Since President Joe Biden took office, there have been 1.7 million known “runaways” who evaded the Border Patrol, seconds to the House National Security Committee.

Most illegal immigrants are originally from Mexico, seconds in July Pew Research data. These illegal immigrants represent a large proportion of multiple low-skilled sectors such as agriculture, construction and manufacturing, seconds in Pew Research in 2020.

EJ Antoni, a researcher at the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Pressure at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that because black workers are a large part of the low-skilled workforce, the arrival of immigrant workers from low qualifications mostly means that black Americans face pressure on their wages and employment.

“When President Trump says illegals are taking away black jobs, I don't see any [other] One way of looking at it is that it's not competing with black Americans who have those jobs,” Antoni said. “And because of the increased competition, they're losing those jobs. A disproportionate amount of black people are in unskilled jobs, it has nothing to do with skin color.”

Immigration depresses wages and employment, especially in the black community, due to increased labor supply, seconds to a 2010 study by the US Commission on Civil Rights. He found that because the black community is “disproportionately employed in the low-skilled labor market,” the effects of immigration affect black Americans more than other groups.

Gordon Hanson, a professor of urban policy at Harvard University and co-author of a 2006 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on immigration and black employment, told the DCNF that while immigration affects labor markets, we have learned more since 2006 about its effects on certain demographics and which industries and places in America are most vulnerable.

“We've learned that the impact of immigration on labor markets depends much more on your occupation and where you live than on your demographic characteristics, such as your race or ethnicity,” Hanson told the DCNF. “If there are groups in the labor market, whether black, Hispanic or other workers, who live in places where the local economy has declined or who have levels of education or experience that leave them exposed to adverse events in the economy in (such as globalization or technological change), these groups are likely to be disproportionately affected by these negative changes. But the impacts on these workers are not about their market segment employment that these workers occupy”.

When the number of workers increased by 10% due to immigration, wages for black workers decreased by 4%, employment by 3.5%, and black incarceration increased by 0.8%, seconds to the NBER in 2006. For white men, there was a 4.1% decline in wages, but only a 1.6% decline in employment and a 0.1% increase in incarceration white

The Biden administration it began in June to restrict new asylum applications at the southern border if the daily average for a week exceeds 2,500. However, the job growth touted by the administration relies heavily on immigrant labor, as foreign-born workers took dramatically more jobs overall than native-born Americans.

“Illegal immigration disproportionately affects black workers, including other minority workers, and we must do everything we can to protect them from their jobs and keep them from being removed,” Trump's spokeswoman said. Karoline Leavitt, at the DCNF, saying that around 1.1 million. jobs went to foreign-born workers, as native-born Americans saw a 943,000 job gain decrease over the past year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

“Black unemployment remains higher than when President Trump was in office,” Leavitt said. “And real wages for black Americans are lower under Biden-Harris. That's why President Trump has promised the largest deportation operation in U.S. history since President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kamala Harris It will grant amnesty and citizenship to 15 million illegal aliens and make the assault on black American jobs permanent.”

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