August 8, 2016
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| Article By John Gibbs |
As an American who is black, I’m supposed to hate Donald Trump. They say he’s a racist demagogue. They say he hates Mexicans. They say he hates women. They say he’s mean. Yes, I’ve heard it all. But I believe that above all the sensationalist name-calling, there is a strong case for black support for Trump.
They say when white people catch a cold, black people get pneumonia. Nothing illustrates this better than the trends of automation, globalization, and immigration, which have left many black people in the dust even while lifting many immigrant groups and other races into the middle class.
Indeed, until about midway through the twentieth century, a black man with only a high school education could earn a good enough living to buy a home and support a family on a single income. Today, that is much more difficult. Research from the nonpartisan, nonprofit policy analysis group Young Invincibles shows that “holding all else equal, an African American male needs some college credit to have a similar probability of employment as a white male high school dropout.” The unemployment rate for black men with only a high school education is 9.6 percent, more than twice as high as the white male rate for that education level.
While the forces of globalization and automation that have contributed to this situation cannot be stopped, some policy solutions warrant consideration.
Bad Economic Policies Especially Hurt Black People
Take illegal immigration. Untold millions entering the United States illegally over the past decades have dramatically increased the size of the labor pool at the low end of the market, harming prospects for wage increases by poor blacks. Indeed, The United States Commission on Civil Rights, in its 2010 report “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers,” found not only wage suppression effects on black workers due to illegal immigration, but also reduced employment rates, and evidence of racial discrimination against black workers, due to employers perceiving they can pay illegal immigrants less than black workers, among other factors.
One of the report’s contributors, Gordon Hanson, found “a 10 percent immigrant-induced increase in the labor supply is associated with a 4 percent decrease in black wages, a 3.5 percent decrease in the black employment rate, and a 0.8 percent increase in the black incarceration rate.” That’s right, Hanson’s data suggests that even black crime is negatively impacted by illegal immigration, as some black men turn to crime in the absence of jobs.
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