During Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago last week, the former president ignited severe corporate media backlash over a number of comments, including a claim that illegal immigration has been disastrous for black workers. But while the liberal press may be outraged, the data and hard realities of the Biden-Harris border invasion prove Trump correct.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic layoffs, three-fourths of all hiring has gone to foreign-born workers, a population that includes full-time legal residents, temporary visitors, and the illegal alien population – the latter of which has exploded under the Biden-Harris administration. While U.S.-born employment is up 971,000 over that time frame, foreign-born employment is up 3.2 million.
U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree have been particularly affected by this trend. As CIS also reports, “labor force participation for less-educated ‘prime age’ (25-54) U.S.-born men remains at historic lows compared to prior peaks in the business cycle.”
In other words, U.S.-born men without a college degree are bearing the brunt of the economic impacts of unchecked migration across the southern border. An estimated 60 percent of all new arrivals to the United States do not have a college degree, putting them in direct competition with Americans without a college degree.
This alarming trend is often lost in deceptively low unemployment figures, which only include those who say they have sought work in recent months – and not the more than 59 million prime-age American adults who have dropped out of the labor force entirely.
Demographic statistics also show that a disproportionate number of American-born prime-age workers without a college degree are racial minorities. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 42 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans over the age of 25 have at least a bachelor’s degree, while that figure is 21 percent for Hispanics and 28 percent for blacks.
Kathleen Wells, the Executive Director for Black America for Immigration Reform, a think tank that focuses on the protection of black workers, has argued that “with every increase in mass immigration, black Americans lose a certain percentage of their wealth.” She pointed specifically to a 2017 report from the National Academies which found that a one percent increase in the foreign-born population of the United States workforce leads to a 1.7 percent decrease in the wages of black workers.
Most estimates put the number of individuals who have crossed into the United States illegally under the Biden-Harris administration at 10 million or higher. If Harris wins the presidency this November, some experts believe that number could more than double to 25 million – likely leading to an even greater increase in wage declines for black workers.
Donna Jackson, the Director of the Black Leadership Network program at the National Center for Public Policy Research, has pointed out that open borders policies could be viewed “as racism” by depriving black Americans of economic freedom and hindering their ability to provide for their families.
Jackson also said that that many black Americans believe illegal aliens are undercutting their jobs and causing a shortage of affordable housing. “It’s not a conspiracy theory, but the perspective of people who have suddenly realized their helplessness in the face of this unjust, crushing reality,” retired economist and sociologist Professor Wolfgang Fliesbach, who served as an advisor to high-ranking politicians in the German CDU in the late 1980s, told me. “They are expressing their sense of betrayal and abandonment.”
Further adding to this perception are handouts from the federal government to illegal aliens. Migrants in federal custody receive food, shelter, and medical care funded by American taxpayers.
“Donald Trump bravely addresses this detrimental impact of immigration, unlike other Western politicians who refrain from doing so, and he is correct,” Professor Fliesbach added. Trump’s message appears to be resonating with the public, as voters consistently rank the border crisis among the most important issues to them. Moreover, 55 percent of Americans now say they’d like to see limits on legal immigration as well, recognizing the downward pressure it puts on the wages of American-born workers.
Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor at Princeton University, likewise recently argued that “longer-term analysis over the past century” points to the conclusion that “inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed.” In other words, history suggests American workers of every race thrive during periods of limited migration, and struggle during periods of mass unchecked migration.
Nonetheless, while Trump has called for mass deportation of the estimated16.8 million illegal aliens in the U.S., Harris has called for creating a “pathway to citizenship” – a policy that would undoubtedly only encourage even more migrants to attempt to illegally enter the country.
As much as the corporate media and liberal establishment attempt to downplay the calamitous implications of the left’s open borders policies, reality now appears to be breaking through for Americans of all backgrounds – and it may cost Democrats dearly this November.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
