01/20/2024
Earlier this month I posted Valiant Black Academic Sacrifices Career To Protest Turpitude Of Black Congressional Caucus About Immigration’s Damage To Blacks.
A Black academic called Roger House has just destroyed his chances of getting onto the Harvard Faculty by posting a remarkable article: How Mass Immigration Hurts Black Americans, Daily Beast, January 7, 2024 [Archive Link].
To date, the body of 60 members — three Senate Democrats, 55 voting House Democrats and two non-voting — has been missing in action. The skirting of duty is largely the result of being beholden to campaign money, business support, and Hispanic and progressive factions of the party. Now is the time for the dereliction to stop.
With generosity uncommon amongst writers House then drew attention to an excellent op-ed in the black newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune which I applauded in Black Community Leader Incisively Denounces 1965 Act’s Harm To Black Americans.
In this piece the author, T. Willard Fair, went into more economic detail:
Consider the years 1940 to 1980 — a period of comparatively lower immigration that generally led to tight labor markets… Black men saw their real incomes increase four-fold during those decades. Black men’s earnings actually rose faster than white men’s…
During that same time period, the share of Black Americans who were considered “middle class” exploded, growing from 22% to 71% … But progress among Black workers leveled off starting around 1970, five years after Congress passed laws that significantly increased rates of immigration.
Fair concluded:
…if we want to create a fairer economy, we can no longer ignore immigration’s unique contribution to racial inequality.
Roger House has once more returned to the breach as best he could: Biden and Congress Must Address the Border and Black Labor’s ‘Bread-and-Butter’ Issues, The Messenger, January 13, 2024.
I am afraid it is probably significant that this piece had to appear in a much weaker webzine.
Also that House had to muffle his message with genuflections to more PC culprits.
…the plight of Black labor is exacerbated by a history of racial discrimination by employers and unions, and by competition with immigrants in certain occupations… but Black labor undeniably fared better in the 1960s and 1970s before challenges to affirmative action policies and the surge of foreign workers that began in the 1980s.
(I doubt that the extremely recent Supreme Court summersault on affirmative action has yet had any effect on anyone. But it is certainly bitterly resented.)
But he does manage to state his case:
One glaring problem is the unpredictable surges of permanent economic immigrants, which is the honest description of the vast number of migrants at the southern border seeking asylum.
even getting in a thrust at the Administration, complaining of
Biden’s unfulfilled promise to make Black American labor a priority for the thousands of skilled construction jobs under the infrastructure and clean energy laws.
House then bravely embarks on a brief review of the academic literature on the impact of mass immigration on wages and particularly Black wages. This essentially consists of special pleading and subterfuge by Open Borders apologists attempting to deny the Law of Supply and Demand. House wisely prefers the George Borjas study he cited in his first piece, which concluded
…we find that a 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%, lowered the employment rate by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate by 1.3 percentage points.
He approvingly supplements this with a reference to September 2023 House testimony by Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, saying expansive immigration harms the most marginalized American workers.
House particularly distinguishes himself in saying:
…the Congressional Black Caucus is a professional class with interests that may differ from those of its base.
In other words spoils-gathering. Michelle Malkin asked in Congressional Black Corruption
[W]hy have entrenched members of the Congressional Black Caucus spent more time enriching themselves than taking care of their neglected constituents?
Sadly, having done so well, House flounders. Having renounced support for
…former President Donald Trump’s harsh policies on border security, such as building a border wall…
(without which he doubtless would not have been published), he has no political alternative except the feeble suggestion.
If Biden fails to heed the call, Black voters should consider pinning their hopes on local and state elections over the presidential election.
Grade: Promising, but Incomplete.
But Roger House has done great work in getting the facts into circles which would otherwise not hear them.
Applaud Roger House .
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.