Blacks Losing Out As Hispanics Gain Power

AFTER a century of top-down social programs and half a century of enormous immigration, you’d expect that things would not be going too well where immigrants interface with the low-paid and the low skilled in America’s cities. You’d expect that there would be countless examples of “unintended consequences” of government programs and high-toned reforms laying waste to the poor and the immigrant.

And you would be right.

And things are going to get worse. The huge Hispanic immigration of the past half-century is about to hit African Americans on the chin, according to Frank Morris and James G. Gimpel. Of course, the low-paid have always faced competition from immigrants, but to the blacks isolated in the inner cities there is an additional problem.

The instrument of their isolation is, in part, sustained high levels of immigration into adjoining areas, and to areas exhibiting employment growth in the low-skill labor market where employers commonly show a preference for immigrants over African Americans.

Fact is, employers just don’t want to hire African Americans. For a host of reasons which, in liberal America, we don’t dare to discuss.

Now what would you think that academics Morris and Gimpel propose to deal with this problem? Of course. More government. They are concerned that affirmative action didn’t benefit blacks enough.

Arguably, the African American demand for affirmative action benefits other minority groups more than it does African Americans, in spite of the fact that the latter have borne the disproportionate costs of political support.

Oh dear. What a shock that is. How could a liberal government program have gone so wrong? This is amazing. Has it ever happened before?

Never mind the tsunami of liberal politics that has devasted the African American family. Never mind the affirmative action in education that has encouraged African American children to slack off in school. Never mind the tolerance of black racism by liberal elites. No, what we need is more privilege and quotas.

African Americans have an abiding policy interest in the enforcement of immigration laws; greater public financial support for access to higher education; reduced immigration, especially of the low skilled and less educated; greater support for progressive taxation; federal financial support to increase the supply of affordable housing; and other matters of importance to a majority of African Americans.

The stunning ignorance, we might say “liberal fundamentalism,” of this agenda is breathtaking.

What blacks need to do is take the Road to the Middle Class. They need to build their own churches; they need to seek out education and build their own schools like the Irish if liberals keep standing in the schoolhouse door; they need to create their own networks of sweat equity and self-help; they need to create a healthy environment of self-government in their neighborhoods and cities.

That is what it takes to succeed in America. Not more government programs!

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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