Guest Column
Immigration Matters -- 150 Years of Black Fears of Job Loss
- By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
- New America Media
- February 16, 2006
- __________________________________________________________
- Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an associate editor at New America Media and the author of "The Crisis in Black and Black." This is the third and final article in a series by Hutchinson on why blacks fear immigration.
- New America Media article at: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=ca87807242107e965b3f2ffb6d423214
“Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of
employment by some newly arrived emigrant." A century and a half ago, a
deeply conflicted Frederick Douglass saw immigration as a looming threat
to the fragile economic gains that Northern blacks had made in some trades
and industries. The famed black abolitionist and pioneer civil rights
champion was no lone voice in denouncing immigration. Black leaders waged
ferocious fights with each other over ideology, politics and leadership,
but they closed ranks on immigration. "The continual stream of
well-trained European laborers flowing into the West," warned educator
Booker T. Washington in an 1882 speech, "leaves Negroes no foothold."
Washington's great fear was that immigration would displace Northern
blacks from manufacturing industries and that Southern landowners would
use cheap European and Asian labor to boot blacks off the land. Educator
and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois railed against Washington's
racially accommodationist views. Yet, like Washington, he attacked
immigration as a dire threat to blacks. He accused "the Northern
industrialist of the promotion of alien immigration to eliminate black
workers, and depress wages."
During and immediately following World War I, millions more Eastern and
Southern Europeans poured into the country to escape war, poverty, hunger
and anti-Semitic pogroms. Many were poorly educated, marginally skilled
workers who crowded the cities and muscled blacks out of the bottom-rung
manufacturing and farm jobs. Black leaders and rabidly racist,
America-first anti-immigration proponents screamed loudly for Congress to
stop the flood.
In an editorial in 1919, the New York Age, a black newspaper, skipped the
niceties. "Speaking purely from a motive of self-interest, the American
Negro can say that the passing of a law restricting immigration for four
years is a good thing." Two years later, the Chicago Defender, which had
virtually become the bible for black American readers by the early 1920s,
chimed in, "The restrictions recently placed upon immigration to these
shores ought to help us if they do not help anybody else." In a speech in
1920, black nationalist Marcus Garvey painted an even scarier picture of
what unchecked immigration could mean for blacks: "We will be out of jobs,
and we will be starving." It was vintage, over the top, stir-the-masses
Garvey rhetoric. But it pricked a public nerve.
When Congress passed a racially exclusionary anti-immigration bill in
1924, the black press cheered madly. The Immigration Act of 1924 barred
entry of "aliens ineligible to citizenship." Because Japanese and other
Asians were barred by a 1790 law stipulating that "whites only" could be
naturalized, the 1924 act effectively ended the immigration of all Asians
into the United States.
The radical, pro-Socialist, pro labor Messenger instantly hailed the bill
as a victory for black workers and claimed that it would open up more
jobs. A year later, the National Urban League's house organ, Opportunity,
which championed black professional and business interests and
relentlessly opposed the Messenger's pro-Socialist views still applauded
the anti-immigrant assault: "The gaps made by the reduction in immigrant
labor have forced a demand for Negro labor despite theories which hold
that they are neither needed nor desired."
The 1924 restrictive immigration law didn't totally allay black fears that
immigration would unhinge their tenuous economic plight. Some blacks
viewed Mexican immigrants as the new threat to black jobs. In 1927, the
Pittsburgh Courier pushed the panic button and warned that Mexican
immigrants would "menace" blacks' position in industry. "The Mexicans are
being used as laborers on the railroads, on public works and on the farms,
thus taking the places of many Negro workers." The Courier did not blame
Mexican immigrants for taking jobs, but regarded them as pathetic pawns of
greedy, unscrupulous employers to depress wages, labor standards and sow
divisions with black workers.
Though the Courier nailed employers for exploiting illegal immigrants, it
did not take the next logical step and urge black workers, labor groups
and civil rights leaders to join with Mexican workers and fight for better
wages, fair hiring practices and improved labor standards, and against Jim
Crow segregation that impoverished black and Mexican workers. This was the
pre-Depression era of naked, laissez-faire capitalism, and the black press
and black leaders banked on the goodwill of white corporate employers for
black economic gains. The Courier wailed that Mexican immigrants would
snatch jobs from blacks in public works and railroads in the 1920s. But
the estimated million or so Mexican illegal immigrants that trickled into
the United States then was relatively low. They were mostly concentrated
in the Southwest and posed no direct threat to blacks in the industrial
North. Yet, in singling out Mexican illegal immigration as a potential
danger to blacks in the 1920s, the Courier gave verbal ammunition to
opponents of illegal immigrants that some blacks decades later would
eagerly pick up and use.
Starting more than a century ago, Douglass, Washington, DuBois, Garvey and
the black press sounded alarms over legal and illegal immigration. They
forged a strange alliance with conservative and even fringe anti-immigrant
groups to finger-point immigrants as the ultimate peril to blacks. As the
national debate rages over illegal immigration, some black leaders and
their strange bedfellows are doing the same thing again.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed by HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)