Blacks Split On Support For Illegal Immigrants

by Oscar Avila - April 23, 2006 - Chicago Tribune

When more than 100,000 protesters marched through the streets of Chicago to support illegal immigrants, Rev. Gregory Daniels and other African-American leaders took notice.

Daniels is trying to mobilize his own community, matching workers with jobs that pay well. In his Englewood office, he has mounted poster boards with lists of workers he has connected to construction jobs at Donald Trump's new building and other sites.

He's sympathetic to the marchers, but Daniels says illegal immigrants undercut Englewood residents by flooding the market with workers willing to take less money.

"Let me tell you what the mind-set of the African-American is when they see those marches: `They are here to replace us,'" Daniels said. "We've got to be careful because I don't want to see an eruption between the blacks and the browns over the immigration issue."

The following are the kind of facts that heavily influence the debate:

"A Pew Hispanic Center poll released last month found that 41 percent of African-American respondents in Chicago said they had lost a job to an immigrant compared with 15 percent of white, non-Hispanic respondents."

"Harvard University professor George Borjas released a report in 2004 that found that African-American wages fell 4.5 percent--a larger drop than among white workers--during an immigration boom between 1980 and 2000."

What seems obvious is that liberal democratic and black leadership are enthusiastically embracing the illegals as they count on them to vote democratic and liberal. The black workers who are losing their jobs and losing income are expected to continue to vote democrat, no matter what leadership does on the issue of illegals, and so the concerns of black workers and their families are simply ignored.