STATEMENT OF ISSUE
By Dr Claude Anderson
Despite the stance of many civil rights groups, immigration’s impact on native Blacks
and their communities is disproportionate, direct and devastating. The Harvest Institute strongly opposes any policies that increase immigration, open this nation’s borders, legalize 11 million to
20 million existing illegal immigrants, increase the number of immigrant guest workers or ease newly arriving immigrants’ access to jobs, health care, education and voting. The Harvest Institute’s mission is to help Blacks become self-sufficient and competitive as a group in America.
THE HARVEST INSTITUTE
The Harvest Institute is a 10-year old national education, research, policy and advocacy
organization whose programs and activities focus specifically on uplifting Black America.
The Harvest Institute should not be confused with civil rights groups that have a broader mission. It is important to clarify several important points at the beginning of this Information Alert. The status and life circumstances of today’s native Black Americans, the descendants of African
slaves, are shaped by the specific laws, public policies and societal culture that excluded Blacks economically, politically and socially. Therefore, when the Harvest Institute uses the term Black, it is targeted just as specifically. “Black” is not equivalent to and, therefore, should not be
included in such amorphous popular concepts as minorities, multicultural, diversity, people of color or the poor.
CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATION
Because Blacks were enslaved by laws, Congress had to pass new corrective laws and Constitutional Amendments to change government policies that were legal under slavery but illegal after emancipation. Congress mandated Due Process and Equal
Protection in the 13th and 14th Constitutional Amendments, and the 1866 Civil Rights Law mandated, “All levels of
government to use all necessary means to lift all the badges and incidents of slavery off the shoulders of Black people.” None of the mandated corrective actions have ever occurred. Nor did
the civil rights laws and social integration of the 1960s lift the “badges and incidences of
slavery” from the native Black Americans. Instead the federal government enacted policies which allowed an unending flow of immigrants to enter and compete with Blacks for space,
rights, access to jobs, education, healthcare and business opportunities.
The Harvest Institute cannot support current immigration policies, nor any increase in alien benefits until the
Constitutionally mandated justice to native Blacks is fully accomplished.
Ways Immigration Injures Native Blacks
Population Wars for Resources:
The civil rights laws and social integration of the 1960s did not lift the “badges and
incidents of slavery” and native Blacks are now being pushed into a permanent underclass by an
ever increasing influx of immigrants. More than 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, entered
the country between 1970 and 1990. This unprecedented flood of humanity into the country has stressed our physical, educational, health, social and political infrastructure. Accommodating
language differences alone cost billions of dollars to schools and other public agencies. The
Center for Immigration Studies states that immigrant-headed households currently consume
more in public services than they pay in taxes and estimates that the fiscal burden ranges from
$11 billion to $20 billion above the net gain from having immigrants in the work force. In a 1995
article in the Journal of Economics Perspectives titled, “The Economic Benefits from
Immigration,” George Borjas, a Harvard economist that specializes in immigration, said that the,
“...increase in Gross Domestic Product generated by immigrants is consumed by them.” In 1997
the National Research Council reported that the small economic benefits generated by arriving
immigrants accrue to the nation’s corporate elite. This unfair competition for resources, public
and private, devastates native Black Americans.
We live in a majority-wins-and-rules and minority-loses-and-suffers society. Our
immigration policies have made native Black Americans this nation’s only planned, permanent,
involuntary minority loser. Native Black Americans have never been allowed to compete in the
population war beginning as far back as 1790 when Congress enacted the first naturalization law
that placed a zero quota on Black immigrants. Hispanics, who are non-Anglo Saxon Whites
speaking Spanish, are the best example of a group that has been awarded immigration
advantages that elevate them over native Blacks in the population war.
The National Hispanic Party publicly declared a population war on Black Americans in
the early 1970s at a mid-west meeting, and crafted plans to numerically surpass and supplant
native Black Americans by the year 2000. The 2000 Census indicates success and Blacks have
been reduced from second-class to third-class citizens. In 1900, there were only 100,000
Hispanics and 11 million Black Americans. With identical birthrates, our immigration policies
allowed Hispanics to increase their population through immigration by over 36,000 percent by
the time of the 2000 Census. Immigration policies held Black population growth to a mere 300
percent over that same one hundred year time period. Black taxpayers’ dollars helped fund
public resources used to meet the needs of immigrants, even though many of those very same
resources were not available to native Black Americans.
Immigrants Displace Native Black Americans:
Throughout this country’s history there have been successive waves of immigrants to
block native Blacks access to, or to push them off of, the upward ladder of success. Immigrants
have two basic incentives that draw them to America: First, the public service benefits available
to them because of the Black Civil Rights Movement and second, the liberalized immigration
reform law of 1965. Immigrants flood into America looking for space, rights, economics and a
priority in the nation’s conscience. Immigrants displace Blacks in each area. Where is Equal
Protection for Blacks?
SPACE.
Although a growing number of immigrants locate in the suburbs, most
immigrants find residential and commercial space in urban Black ghettos. Once they establish a
toe-hold in ghettos, they then mark and close the space by using their language and culture as
barriers. Segregated cultural space allows immigrants to concentrate their resources and establish
political and economic niches. (Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and
Politics,Virginia Yans-McLaughlin) Urban areas with high Black populations such as Detroit,
Miami, Los Angles, Philadelphia, New York, District of Columbia, have Korea towns, Mexican
town, Japan towns, China towns, Little Hialeah, Little Havana, and Little Cambodia. Harlem in
New York is no longer Black, nor are Overtown or Liberty City in Florida. As immigrants
concentrate, Blacks are displaced whether in Compton, Watts, and Inglewood in California.
Numerical displacement means diminished economic and political influence for native Blacks.
ECONOMICS.
The economic impact of immigrants on native Black Americans is
quantifiable. For every 10 percent increase in the number of immigrants, native Black income is
reduced by three-tenths of one percent. In the 1950s, Blacks had an earning ratio of 56 cents to
every $1 earned by Whites. As a result of the Black Civil Rights Movement in 1970, the Black
earnings ration was up to 66 cents compared to a White dollar. However, between 1970 and
1990, there was a 300 percent increase in the number of Asians, Hispanics and Arabs
immigrants. The ratio of Black earnings to White dropped from 66 cents back to 57 cents, nearly
identically to where it was at the beginning of the Black Civil Rights Movement. In short, the
nine-point economic gains of the Black Civil Rights movement was wiped out by the 300
percent increase of immigrants that occurred between 1970 and 1990. (Immigration Reader,
David Jacobson, 223)
EDUCATION.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision was to
have corrected damage that was inflicted on Black students over 360 years of no schools and poor schools. But before any major educational improvements could be made, the immigration
reforms of 1965 brought in a massive influx of immigrant “minority children” who began to
compete with native Black children for resources. The country’s mandated legal obligation was
to “lift the burdens and incidences of slavery from the shoulders of
Blacks.” There are no Constitutional mandates to give newly arriving immigrant children, legal and illegal, educational
advantages over native Blacks. Prevailing policies and laws, however, gave immigrants
preferential treatment over Blacks. Here are some examples.
• In the early 1970s the Great Society education programs for inner-city Black children
were converted into bi-lingual education programs for immigrants.
• In the Fall of the 2000 presidential election campaign, Congress approved and Vice
President Albert Gore delivered, one billion dollars to Hispanic children in the Los
Angles, California schools, but not one single penny for Black children in the same
system.
• Local school systems nationwide spend $3,000 more per year to educate an immigrant
child than it does a native Black child. The average cost of educating a native child is
$6,000, therefore $9,000 for an immigrant child. If only 50% of the 9 million illegal
immigrants are educated in the school systems, they would impose a staggering financial
burden of $35 billion, primarily on underfunded urban school systems.
• In most mixed school districts, Hispanics have taken over the bulk of administrative
positions.
It is a sad irony when native Black taxpayers, whose children have suffered generations of
educational deprivation and abuse, pick up the tab for education programs specially designed for
children from foreign countries.
EMPLOYMENT.
Whether the jobs categories are unskilled or highly specialized, this
nation has a long history of displacing Blacks to make employment opportunities for immigrants.
According to a United States Department of Commerce survey that was conducted in 1865, over
100,000 of the nation’s 120,000 skilled craftsmen and artisans were Black Americans just
released from slavery. Similarly, at that time between 55 and 65 percent of all Southern farmers
were Black former slaves. But, instead of main streaming the nearly five million newly freed
slaves, President Abraham Lincoln’s administration enacted this nation’s first immigration
reform. That action brought in 26 million European immigrants by 1900 to replace native Blacks
in jobs and businesses. Ethnic unions initiated “White Only” polices that allowed the arriving
European immigrants to displace skilled Blacks by eliminating them from competition. For
another century, the unfortunate native Blacks were employed only in the lowest paid, dirtiest
and hardest jobs with few if any benefits.
That historical pattern continues today. In highly skilled job categories such as
researchers, engineers, scientists and computer specialists,
Blacks are displaced by immigrants
with the assistance of laws. Reforms in visa laws enacted in 1986 were designed specifically to
attract technically skilled immigrants. Today, nearly 50 percent of the workers who fill highly
technical jobs are immigrants recruited and hired under the H-1B visa program. These workers
displace highly trained native Blacks and allow U.S. corporations to fill their technical needs
without training, or working with schools to train, native Black workers. Corporations also
release native workers and transfer thousands of jobs to other countries, further reducing the
number of jobs available to native Black Americans. Approximately 55% of the staff members at
historically Black Colleges are immigrants and non-Blacks.
The Center for Immigration Studies published a report in 2001 entitled Immigration from
Mexico, that documents that immigrants, in the area of low-skilled jobs and especially from
Mexico, displace native Blacks from employment such as landscaping, construction, hotel and
airport service employment, nail care, auto repair, janitorial services, groceries stores, sanitation
workers, liquor stores, restaurants, barbering and low level public service jobs. Immigrants also
displace native Blacks in businesses and industries they once controlled such as funeral homes,
medical practices, gas stations and restaurant cooks and chefs. Native Blacks did not find new
industries and employment opportunities. Immigrants operate their businesses in Black
communities, but they will not buy from Black businesses and they rarely hire Blacks as
employees. (“Help Unwanted,” The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 1995)
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.
Affirmative action programs were originally designed to
correct injustices to one race of people, Blacks, by another race of people, Whites; to eliminate
the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But today, affirmative action programs have
been converted into preference programs for immigrants even though most categories of
immigrants are White and have never been negatively impacted by racism or racial conditions
that caused these programs to be developed. (“Immigration Keeping Blacks on Bottom Rung,”
New York Daily News, September 11, 1995) This error can be traced to the Immigration and
Reform Control Act of 1986, which effectively required employers to treat immigrants exactly
like native born cit
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