Back on Thursday June 27, when Donald Trump and Joe Biden face off during their first — and only — debate, one of the biggest takeaways was a comment made by the Republican candidate when asked about what Biden has done for Black voters:
"The fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he's allowed to come in through the border. They're taking Black jobs now — and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people. They're taking Black jobs, and they're taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven't seen it yet, but you're gonna see something that's going to be the worst in our history."
The comment quickly faced backlash with everyone from the NAACP to Rep. Ilhan Omar questioning what the former president meant.
Weeks later, in typical Trump fashion, he doubled down on the remarks during the National Association of Black Journalists convention. "A lot of journalists in this room are Black," Trump said, prompting laughter and gasps from the audience. "I will tell you that coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking Black jobs."
When asked to elaborate by moderator Rachel Scott from ABC News, Trump dodged the question by simply saying that "a Black job is anybody that has a job, that's what it is," adding of undocumented immigrants that "they're taking the employment away from Black people."
Since then, despite becoming a catch phrase popularized by Michell Obama at the DNC, the narrative of "lost Black jobs" has gained traction in some communities. But a new study by the Migration Policy Institute, has unveiled that there doesn't seem to be any correlation between the growing share of foreign-born workers in the work place and the unemployment numbers of U.S.-born Black workers.
Findings from the study show that the number of jobs in the United States has consistently grown, even as the share of foreign-born workers has increased during the Biden administration. This expansion does not appear to have come at the expense of U.S.-born Black workers. Rather, the perception of job displacement might stem from the visibility of immigrant workers in industries and regions where they were less present in the past.
"Even as immigrants have represented a growing share of the U.S. labor force, the pie has gotten bigger too, such that U.S.-born Black workers have maintained their share of the job market and have also contributed to sustaining growth in the U.S.-born population" explains the study. "There were 2,357,000 more U.S.-born Black prime-age workers in 2022 than in 1990, partially compensating for the 10,227,000 U.S.-born White workers who left the job market."
In other words, the decline in native-born workers' share was mainly due to a decrease in the number of U.S.-born White workers, not Black workers.
The workforce composition has, in fact, evolved over time, with immigrants and U.S.-born Black workers increasingly working side-by-side in southern states and various industries. U.S.-born Black workers have seen changes in their industry representation, with many shifting from construction to trucking as a primary employment sector, reflecting broader demographic and economic trends.
Furthermore, the rhetoric fails to observe an important element about immigrant labor that contributes to overall employment: immigrants also contribute to job creation by increasing demand for goods and services and by starting businesses of their own. To top it all off, they often fill roles that U.S.-born workers are unwilling or unable to take.
The study concludes that "scapegoating immigrants" only serves to obscure "questions on how governments can use immigration policy to ensure an adequate supply of workers as the U.S. population ages and amid low unemployment levels, as well as how policymakers and employers can ensure a dynamic, flexible, and diverse labor market where workers can reinvent themselves."
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