Democrats and their college-graduate media allies are scoffing at President Donald Trump’s campaign charge that President Joe Biden’s migration has economically damaged blue-collar black and Hispanic Americans.
The evasion by university-trained political activists is partly intended to counter Trump’s partially successful outreach to blue-collar black men who recognize the pocketbook damage from migration.
“There’s too many people coming across the border, getting all the jobs and I don’t like that,” Carling Colbert, a black retired warehouse worker from Macon, Ga., told the Washington Post for a June 30 article. “Trump was better on that. He tried to build the wall.”
“The fact is that [Biden’s] big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border [and] they’re taking Black jobs now,” Trump said in his debate with Biden. “They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs. And you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history,” he added.
The morning after the debate, Democratic activists and left-leaning journalists railed against Trump’s comments.
Most of the Democratic responses focused on Trump’s literal words — “black jobs” — rather than his serious change of economic damage.
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“The former president went on a bizarre rant at Thursday’s debate about immigrants taking ‘Black jobs’—no one knows what he means,” claimed the New Republic on June 28.
“Black political strategists, elected officials, and heads of organizations quickly joined hundreds of social media users to post photos of themselves at their workplaces and to crack jokes about the reductive and racist nature of the former president’s comments,” the New York Times responded on June 28.
“There is no such thing as a Black job,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP. adding, “We are doctors, lawyers, school teachers, police officers and firefighters … A ‘Black job’ is an American job … But the divisive nature of this comment is not surprising for Donald Trump.”
Trump’s rivals were also quick to throw the racism charge, despite his stated concerns for black employment.
“He didn’t say they’re taking jobs from all Americans because he doesn’t think of those jobs as ones held by typical Americans — white people like him,” wrote columnist Leslie Gray Streeter at TheBaltimoreBanner.com:
Lawyer, doctor, administrator, teacher, manager, journalist? These are not inherently Black jobs in Trump’s mind, which is to say they are white ones. So it’s just those Black and native-born brown people fighting for the jobs on the bottom, and aren’t we lucky to have him looking out for us?
Streeter likely is oblivious to the donor pressure on Trump to ignore the impact of migration on whites’ jobs. Those pressures exist because most of the wage cuts ensured by migration are suffered by whites, including the many university graduates whose salaries are cut by the inflow of white-collar visa workers.
Some media outlets tried to dismiss the evidence of pocketbook harm.
The New York Times claimed migrants are “healthy for the economy” without asking if they are healthy for Americans’ pocketbooks. The AP waffled on the core issue by citing rival research claiming that migration has raised and shrunk wages for blacks.
“The available data, however, doesn’t indicate that immigrants are filling roles en masse that would otherwise go to American citizens,” NBC reported under the headline, “‘Black jobs’? Trump draws pushback after anti-immigration rant.”
But NBC admitted in the 18th paragraph:
When it comes to pay, inflation-adjusted weekly earnings for Black workers reached a two-decade high of $314 under Trump. That was narrowly surpassed in the fourth quarter of 2023 under Biden, hitting $315. But amid persistent inflation and a cooling job market, Black workers’ average weekly earnings declined in the most recent quarter to $293.
There is vast evidence — including admissions from business groups and government reports — that migration shrinks wages and salaries by preventing a “tight labor market.” In a tight market, employers compete for workers by diverting their profits to boost employees’ wages, benefits, work conditions, and technology.
Poll data shows that working-class blacks are more likely to declare opposition to mass migraiton than university-trained blacks who fill white-collar jobs in government and advocacy groups. Breitbart News reported in 2018:
It appears that class membership is a more powerful force in shaping the attitudes of Blacks in comparison to Whites …
For African Americans who lost a job to an immigrant, working-class membership resulted in a 13 percentage point increase in the probability of support for an increased federal role in workplace oversight [againt employment of illegal immigrants] when compared to middle-class African Americans who experienced a similar loss.
The Associated Press acknowledged the polls show that many black Americans recognize that they lose from Biden’s migration:
About 4 in 10 Black adults say it’s a “major risk” that the number of jobs available to American workers will be reduced when immigrants come to the U.S. — whether they arrive legally or illegally — according to an AP-NORC poll from March.
A political writer for the Washington Post reported on June 30:
There is also a deeply ingrained belief among many who spoke to The Post that Trump would act more aggressively than Biden to improve the economy. The struggle to keep up with rising prices has intensified many of those voters’ frustration with Biden’s handling of the influx of immigrants into the United States and the amount of money his administration is spending on aid to Ukraine and Israel….
Sensing opportunity, the MAGA Inc. super PAC backing Trump’s bid began running ads this spring voiced by Black narrators on predominantly Black radio stations in the Macon media market.
Migration also drives up housing costs, especially among blacks living in urban districts.
Amid the media complaints, Trump’s criticism of migration pocketbook impact is now part of his standard stump speech.
Biden “is the biggest phony on Earth,” Trump said in a recent event. “Virtually all of the net jobs created under Biden have gone to migrants — almost 100 percent of the jobs created by crooked Joe.”