I received an email from a fellow-blogger asking my thoughts on a Coalition of Future American Workers YouTube video making the rounds. The spot makes the point that immigrants are responsible for taking jobs away from black Americans, while also depressing wages. In one sense it is true, but more significantly it is disturbingly false.
The fact that global cost factors, driven largely by Chinese economic expansion, place downward pressure on US wages, should not be confused with the stagnant nature of black employment and wage growth. As many blacks accumulate the decades-old impact of discounting the critical link between education and success, they represent an obstacle for the US economy and more recent immigrant groups wishing to navigate up from the bottom.
New US immigrants willing to work for less represent a stop-gap competitive US response to globalization, at best. While real wages in China are going up, American consumers benefit greatly from their less expensive goods. In concert, America is relinquishing it technological lead by eroding, versus growing, its industry demand for science and engineering graduates, and this is what spells our long-term doom.
More to the point of black progress, working harder for reduced wages in America is an expedient, albeit inefficient, strategy to success for those with limited options. As a long-term strategy, dead-end jobs lead to disenfranchisement. However, if you work hard at that crappy job and mind your nickels, you can then invest in education to more efficiently lift yourself (particularly your children), before you burn out. Alternately, if you consume your precious nickels on ‘bling’, you will forever live on the bottom, alienated. With lessening help from racism, this is the behavior and resulting plight of too many blacks in the US.
So people must not be mislead by the Coalition. It is not immigrants that should worry them, but rather the low priority for going to school and getting good grades, compared to wasteful consumption of limited resources. This is not to say that the doors of this country should be wide open. Rather, the immigration debate should be about how incoming cheap labor (also uneducated) can be more expensive, via their infrastructure cost, relative to the value that their labor brings.
Blaming the plight of blacks on issues of immigration is fallacious, and does neither argument justice.
James C. Collier
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