Is Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Bad for Black Americans?

Peter Kirsanow, a black commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, wrote a letter (PDF) to President Barack Obama warning him that giving illegal aliens amnesty would decrease job prospects for black Americans. (Source)

I write to remind you of the disastrous effect of illegal immigration on the employment of all Americans, but particularly black Americans. Any grant of legal status will serve as a magnet to prospective illegal immigrants and further depress employment opportunities and wages for African Americans. Given that the labor force participation rate is at an historic low, the unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, and there has been a precipitous decline in household wealth, the timing for such a grant of legal status could not be worse.

Kirsanow notes that young, low-skilled workers are already having a hard time in this economy. Adding more low-skilled workers to the hiring pool would continue to depress wages. The fact that the potential new workers are here in violation of our laws can’t be emphasized enough.

Why does the Obama administration want to reward people with no respect for American laws with American jobs and the privilege of American citizenship…over law-abiding Americans?

President Obama’s proposed amnesty executive order would have a disparate impact on race and on national origin, Kirsanow writes. Ironically, liberals have invoked “disparate impact” to justify lowering educational and employment standards for certain groups. On standardized tests, for example, blacks tend to perform worse, generally speaking, than Hispanics, whites, and people of East Asian decent. Disparate impact holds that even if a law (or standardized testing policy) has an adverse impact on “protected” minorities as a group, that law is suspect and might be unlawfully discriminatory. That the law is facially neutral–makes no reference to race–doesn’t matter.

Why is the disparate impact of amnesty good, but the disparate impact of racially neutral testing bad?

The more important question is, when will more Obama-supporting black Americans stand up and shout, “No amnesty!”?

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One comment

  1. Obama could care less about the negative effects of illegal immigration on low skill blacks. He know that most blacks are to ignorant to figure it out and by the time they do, he will be out of office.

    Obama’s main job as president is to increase government dependency among Asians, Hispanics and especially the white middle class for the democrat party. He only pays lip service but has no real interest in reducing unemployment.

    The more people are dependent on government, the more likely they are to vote democrat.