Economic progress by African-Americans slowed dramatically after the Immigration Act of 1965.
America’s civil rights movement has been our most significant self-improvement crusade. It would be difficult to find another example in history of a society in which the majority examined and reformed itself from top to bottom as relentlessly as we have with respect to race. Every sector of our society, both public and private, has undergone an intensive three decade process of self-correction.
We recognized that we owed a very special debt to two distinct groups of Americans: the descendants of slavery and Native Americans. We also recognized that simply designing a level playing field after two hundred years of oppression was not enough. We wanted to go farther. We adopted affirmative action to rectify the historic and justified grievances that these two groups had against the majority.
And how have we done? Our report card gets mixed reviews. Talented blacks are prominent today in the media, in sports, in government and in entertainment. As a percentage of population, the number of black professionals has clearly increased.
But the African-American community as a whole has shown remarkably little economic progress since the l970s. The number of black families living below the poverty line, relative to whites, has remained unchanged. Andrew Hacker, a Queens College professor and author of “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and Unequal” recently told a journalist with the Christian Science Monitor, “Despite all the talk of the creation of a black middle class, the relative position of the black community to white America has not changed that much.”
Yet the economic gains made by the African-American community prior to l970, largely in the face of Jim Crow laws, segregation and with minimal help from whites, is a strikingly different story. According to Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, Harvard professors and authors of “America in Black and White,” “while the fraction of black middle class incomes rose almost forty points between l940 and l970, it has inched up only another ten points since then.”
So what happened since the 1970s? And what brought black economic progress to a sudden slowdown at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, despite our greatest economic boom, and at the same time that affirmative action was kicking in?
One major cause is mass immigration resulting from The Immigration Act of 1965. Post l970 immigrants, who are predominately poor and unskilled, have swamped the labor market of black Americans, driving down wages and forcing them to compete with third world labor. In his book, “Heaven’s Door,” George Borjas, Harvard economist and an expert on the labor impacts of immigration, explains that native-born blacks have suffered the largest economic losses due to competition from immigrant labor.
And most surprising, immigration has completely distorted the original purpose of affirmative action. In the monograph, “Affirmative Action for Immigrants: The Entitlement Nobody Wanted,” James S. Robb reports that affirmative action policy never made any distinction concerning citizenship. A company only needed to hire a certain number of employees from diverse racial or ethnic groups, regardless of whether they were born in the United States or their families had ever lived in this country. Since the overwhelming majority of immigrants come from non-European nations, most new immigrants enter this country as the member of a protected minority group and are therefore entitled to affirmative action. At no point are they required to prove that they or any of their ancestors were ever unfairly treated by the people of this country. And in the process, the benefit of affirmative action for blacks has significantly decreased.
In Washington, D.C., during the late l980s, 60 percent of “minority” construction set asides (affirmative action contracts) went to Portuguese immigrants. And in Cincinnati, immigrants from India, the second wealthiest and best educated group in America, are competing with native blacks in a state program that reserved 5 percent of construction projects for minority owned businesses. A black Cincinnati businessman, William A. Cargile, went to court to challenge the entitlement of Indian immigrants to affirmative action. He lost.
Thirty nine years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the failure to create economic parity between whites and blacks is largely the result of our immigration policy. We have grown dependent on low wage foreign labor, oblivious to the impact of these policies on African-Americans, and mired in a vapid infatuation with “diversity.”
The original purpose of affirmative action was to remedy long-standing discrimination against African-Americans and Native Americans. Affirmative action was never intended to become a tool for university administrators or companies to make their organizations racially diverse. Promoting “diversity” at the expense of American blacks and Native Americans, who truly deserve the jobs and the opportunities, is a betrayal of the civil rights movement.
Jonette Christian is a member of Mainers for Sensible Immigration Policy. She lives in Holden. E-mail her at jonette@acadia.net.
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