2024-07-27 03:45:00
It is clear that the major political news of the last few days has come from the Democratic side. But before we miss last week’s Republican national convention, let me focus on a development in the Republican camp that, given everything else going on, may have gone unnoticed: MAGA rhetoric. [siglas en inglés de Haz que Estados Unidos vuelva a ser grande] regarding immigration, which was already ugly, has become even uglier.
So far, most of the anti-immigration slogans coming from Donald Trump and his campaign have consisted of false claims that immigrants are causing our crime wave.
Increasingly, however, Trump and his allies have begun to claim that immigrants are stealing American jobs, and specifically, to blame immigrants for causing terrible damage to the livelihoods of black workers.
Of course, the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans, including native-born black Americans, is nothing new. In particular, it was an obsession for JD Vance, accompanied by misleading statistical analysis, so Trump’s choice of Vance as vice president himself represents a new focus on the alleged economic damage done by immigrants.
So did Trump’s acceptance speech last Thursday, which contained a series of claims about the economics of immigration, including the notion that, in relation to the jobs created during Joe Biden’s presidency, “107% of those jobs have been filled by illegal aliens,” is particularly strange. That number seems patently false, as native-born employment has increased by millions of jobs since Biden took office.
What is relatively new, however, is the attempt to combat immigrants and black Americans. Admittedly, Trump already hinted at this line of attack during his debate with Biden in June, when he declared that immigrants are “using black jobs,” which led to some of them joking about the jobs, exactly, that count as “black”.
But this statement is getting too loud. At the Republican convention, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who is likely to have some role in the next administration if Trump wins, spoke of “a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of black, brown and brown-class Irish people” .
In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week published last week, Trump went even further, declaring that “black people are going to end millions of people coming into the country.” And he said: “Their salaries have been greatly reduced. Immigrants who come into the country illegally are taking their jobs.” And he said to him: “The black population of this country is going to die because of what has happened, because of what is going to happen, and because of their jobs; their jobs, their homes, everything.” Trump’s tirade forced Bloomberg to add this, parenthetically, as a fact check: “According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most job gains since 2018 have been for naturalized US citizens and legal residents .”
There was a time when invective like this would be a sign that a politician lacked the emotional stability and intellectual capacity to hold the highest office in the land. It’s a pity.
Besides, it’s hard to overstate all the cynicism. Trump has a history of relationships with white supremacists, not to mention his long-standing obsession with crime in urban, often predominantly black, areas. However, he clearly sees an opportunity to attract some black voters by turning them against immigrants.
But again, even if we forget the cynicism, this new line of attack on immigration is factually incorrect.
If immigrants are taking all the “black jobs,” it can’t be seen in the data, which shows unemployment among the black population at historic lows. If, as Trump claims, black wages have gone way down, someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says black median income, adjusted for inflation, is much higher than they were around the end of Trump’s term. (They should dismiss the spurt reversal during the pandemic, which reflected composition effects rather than real wage increases.)
One may wonder why, since we have indeed seen an increase in immigration, we do not see signs of a negative, if not catastrophic, impact on black wages or employment. After all, many recent immigrants, especially those in the country illegally, lack a college degree and may not even have attended high school. So aren’t they competing with native born Americans who also don’t have college or high school degrees?
The answer, we’ve known since the 1990s, is that immigrant workers bring a different set of qualifications than native-born workers, even when those workers have the same levels of formal education. And yes, I do mean qualifications: If you think workers without a college degree are “unqualified,” try fixing your plumbing or doing carpentry. It should go without saying, but many blue collar jobs are highly skilled and specialized. As a result, immigrants tend to have a very different job mix than native-born workers, meaning that there is much less direct competition between immigrant and native-born workers than you might think. , or so Trump and Vance want us to think.
The bottom line is that the attempt to present immigration as an apocalyptic threat to black Americans depends on the facts. Will it work politically, despite everything? I do not know.
Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. © The New York Times, 2024. News Clippings Translation
Follow all the information Economy y business in Facebook y Xor in our seminal newsletter
#Trumps #cynical #attempt #turn #immigrants #black #Americans #business