The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights invited a group of labor economists and immigration experts to its Washington, D.C., headquarters in April to debate the thorny issue of immigration and race. Specifically, they wanted to know the effects of the influx of new and, in particular, illegal immigrants on African American employment rates.
Commissioner Peter Kirsanow proposed the hearing, he says, because several studies, such as one conducted by Harvard Kennedy School of Government economist George Borjas, have found that employment, wages, and even incarceration rates of black males have been adversely affected by increased illegal immigration.
The panelists’ opinions covered the range of ideological perspectives, but one point they all agreed on is that the level of illegal immigration to this country has vastly increased the labor supply for low-wage, low-skilled jobs, such as childcare, food preparation, office cleaning and maintenance, and construction.
“The kinds of people who do that kind of work tend to be people who don’t have a lot of education. Either they dropped out of high school or have only a high school degree,” says Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “If the market was tight for [those kinds of jobs], we’d expect that wages and benefits would go up fast as employers try desperately to hold on to what few workers there are and also try to attract other workers. But that’s not what’s happening; in general, wages have either declined or stagnated in the last 20 years.” He believes that this is particularly problematic for less-educated black men who were already earning the lowest wages and have the highest unemployment rates, and therefore must compete with immigrants for jobs. Camarota says, “If one is concerned about less-educated workers in this country, it is difficult to justify continuing high levels of legal and illegal immigration that disproportionately impact the bottom end of the labor market.”
According to Vernon M.
Briggs Jr., a Cornell University emeritus professor of industrial and labor relations, the foreign-born population in the United States increased from 8.4 million in 1965 to 39.3 million in 2007. Approximately 7.4 million immigrant workers are here illegally, competing for low-skilled jobs with 43 million other adults who are legally entitled to work here. “Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low-skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major loser in this competition are low-skilled black workers,” Briggs testified. The situation, he says, is “the civil rights issue of this generation of American workers.”Kirsanow adds, “The problem is you’ve got employers out there who’ve made the pragmatic decision that they prefer illegal immigrants [who will] work for lower wages, in substandard and sometimes even hazardous conditions. They won’t complain because they’re afraid of the consequences, and very often very grateful even to get those jobs because if they were to go back to their home countries, their employment prospects and job conditions are even worse.”
Others on the panel believe that the true heart of the problem is not so much the number of immigrants in the labor supply, but the conditions that drive employers to exploit those workers by offering them lower pay and undesirable working conditions. In his testimony, Gerald Jaynes, a Yale University professor of economics and African American Studies and member of the BE Board of Economists, said, “The terms of the debate must be changed to [reflect] a desire to protect the integrity of the nation’s low-wage labor markets and citizens working in them from conditions inconsistent with standards of living and values of justice in affluent representative democracies.” Remedies would include minimum wage laws for all workers, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit system, and stronger enforcement of laws against undocumented migration.
Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown
University’s Public Policy Institute, also believes that there are policy remedies that could have a more direct impact on African American employment opportunities, particularly for young workers. “Immigration has a wide range of costs and benefits — education, technical education and job training, expanding work supports, and work supplements for childless adults is a good start.”Carol Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University and editor of Debating Immigration, adds, “Although black people are affected disproportionately, I would like to hear people who debate immigration not focus exclusively on African Americans. If this is perceived as a ‘black’ problem, it’s not going to get the attention it needs. I hear people talking about immigrants coming here because they want the American dream. Well, I have a lot of relatives waiting for the American dream. Poor whites and legal immigrants are affected as well as blacks. That kind of gets lost in the debate.”