Guest Column
Discrimination Not Illegal Immigrants Fuel Black Job Crisis
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, PhD
Our Weekly Contributing Writer
The battle continues to rage between economists, politicians, immigrant
rights activists, and black anti-immigration activists over whether illegal
immigrants are the major cause of double-digit joblessness among poor,
unskilled young black males. The battle lines are so tight and impassioned
that black anti-immigration activists plan a march for jobs for American
born blacks on April 28 in Los Angeles. This is a direct counter to the
planned mass action three days later by some immigrant rights groups.
According to Labor Department reports nearly forty percent of young black
males are unemployed. Despite the Bush administration’s boast that it’s tax
cut and economic policies has resulted in the creation of more than 100,000
new jobs, black unemployment still remains the highest of any group in
America. Black male unemployment for the past decade has been nearly double
that of white males. The picture is grimmer for young black males.
But several years before the immigration combatants squared off, then
University of Wisconsin graduate researcher Devah Pager pointed the finger
in another direction, a direction that makes most employer’s squirm. And
that’s the persistent and deep racial discrimination in the workplace. Pager
found that black men without a criminal record are less likely to find a job
than white men with criminal records
Pager’s finger point at discrimination as the main reason for the racial
disparity in hiring set off a howl of protest from employers, trade groups,
and even a Nobel Prize winner. They lambasted her for faulty research. They
said her sample was much too small, and the questions too vague. They
pointed to the ocean of state and federal laws that ban racial
discrimination. But in 2005 Pager, now a sociologist at Princeton duplicated
her study. She surveyed nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City.
She used teams of black and white testers, standardized resumes, and she
followed up their visits with telephone interviews with employers. These are
the standard methods researchers use to test racial discrimination. The
results were exactly the same as in her earlier study. Black men with no
criminal records were no more likely to find work than white men with
criminal records. That’s true despite the fact that New York has some of the
nation’s toughest laws against job discrimination.
Dumping the blame for the chronic job crisis of young, poor black men on
illegal immigration stokes the passions and hysteria of -immigration reform
opponents, but it also lets employers off the hook for discrimination. And
it’s easy to see how that could happen. The mountain of federal and state
anti discrimination laws, affirmative action programs, and successful
employment discrimination lawsuits gives the public impression that job
discrimination is a relic of a shameful, and bigoted racial past.
But that isn’t the case, and Pager’s study is hardly isolated proof of that.
Countless research studies, the Urban League’s annual State of Black America
report, a 2005 Human Rights Watch report, and the numerous EEOC pattern and
practice discrimination complaints, over the past decade, reveal that
employers have devised endless dodges to evade anti-discrimination laws.
That includes rejecting applicants by their names, areas of the city they
live in, and claims of mistaken advertising, and that the jobs advertised
were filled.
In a seven-month comprehensive university study of the hiring practices of
hundreds of Chicago area employers, a few years before Pager’s graduate
study, many top company officials when interviewed said they would not hire
blacks. When asked to assess the work ethic of white, black and Latino
employees by race, nearly forty percent of the employer’s ranked blacks dead
last.
The employers routinely described blacks as “unskilled,” “uneducated,”
“illiterate.” “dishonest,” “lacked initiative,” “unmotivated,” “involved
with gangs and drugs,” “did not understand work,” “unstable,” “lacked
charm,” “had no family values,” and were “poor role models.” The consensus
among these employers was that blacks brought their alleged pathologies to
the work place, and were to be avoided at all costs. White employers didn’t
express these bigoted and ignorant views. The researchers found that black
business owners shared many of the same negative attitudes.
Other surveys have found that a substantial number of non-white business
owners also refuse to hire blacks. Their bias effectively closed out another
area of employment to thousands of blacks, solely based on their color.
This only tells part of the sorry job picture for many poor blacks. The
Congressional Black Caucus reports that at least half of all unemployed
black workers have been out of work nearly a year or more. Many more have
given up looking for work. The Census does not count them among the
unemployed.
The dreary job picture for the unskilled and marginally skilled urban poor,
especially the black poor, is compounded by the racially skewed attitudes of
small and large employers. Even if there was not a single illegal immigrant
in America, that attitude insures that black job seekers would still be just
as poor and unemployed.
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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist and political analyst. Read more at www.Earlofarihutchinson.com - Our Weekly article at: http://www.ourweekly.com/
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