Immigration Viewed from the Back of the Hiring Line

REVIEW ESSAY
Back of the Hiring Line:
A 200-year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias and
Depression of Black Wealth
by Roy Beck
NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation, 2021, 344 pages

In the polarized political climate of the United States, immigration has become a flash point of partisan conflict and demagoguery. Beyond issues concerning economic migrants and refugees, there is now a debate about the extent to which America should regulate movement into the country at all. Some argue that unfettered migration to the United States is a public good that kindhearted Americans should champion.¹ Corpo­rate interests, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argue that immigrants do jobs Americans won’t do² and that there aren’t enough qualified Ameri­cans to meet internal labor needs.³ American politicians, such as Senator Dick Durbin, contend that Americans benefit from falling wages, which is a side effect of competition with foreign workers. Pragmatic discussion about immigration is further muddied when political and corporate forces prioritize the wants of would-be migrants instead of centering the nation’s economic obligations on Americans. The Left, for example, says that U.S. citizens are obligated to support the economic aspirations of displaced foreigners⁴ and Dreamers.⁵

But it hasn’t always been this way. For much of U.S. history, it was broadly agreed that moderating annual legal immigration numbers and deterring illegal migration was a standard of sound governance. Therein lies the core of Roy Beck’s Back of the Hiring Line. The book focuses on the question: what do American institutions owe U.S. citizens? As suggested by the subtitle, A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth, it challenges the reader to examine the costs of immigration, particularly to African Americans. Across the book’s twenty-six chapters, Beck takes the reader on a survey of historical events and political thought, with a focus on the experiences of eman­cipated slaves and their progeny, or Freedmen, as the group bearing the heaviest costs.

Beck makes his case with excerpts from speeches by abolitionists who were also advocates of reducing immigration, excerpts from news reports about immigrant-led race riots, tales of organized economic exclusion of American Freedmen, policy recommendations from civil rights leaders, and data about demographic trends. The book chips away at the com­mon narrative which suggests that advocating for immigration moderation amounts to a form of white supremacy. He explicitly challenges the claim that unfettered immigration is resoundingly positive for American society and debunks the notion that immigration has no negative impact on Americans. Published in late 2021 amid an undeni­able U.S. border crisis, Back of the Hiring Line frames the immigration conversation in a new way, though his proposed policy solutions should have been part of the discourse about immigration all along.

As compelling as Beck’s book is, however, the narrative is wanting in three areas. First, Beck’s call to “let Americans do the work” doesn’t address how to get well-meaning Americans to accept that helping the world does not include inviting everyone to migrate here at the expense of their countrymen. Second, the call to “prioritize descendants of slav­ery” in labor sourcing doesn’t discuss how to reinvigorate the Freed­men protected class status for descendants of U.S. slaves. Third, despite noting policymakers’ indifference to African Americans on the issue of immigration, Beck is too generous toward legislators’ claims of “unin­tended consequences” regarding the negative policy impacts that wave after wave of immigration has had on descendants of U.S. slaves. Each major wave, significantly, occurred when African Americans were on the cusp of economic advancement: namely, after emancipation and after the enactment of civil rights.

This is Beck’s most important contribution: to spotlight the impacts of unfettered migration on one of our nation’s oldest citizen groups, American Freedmen. By identifying the impacts on descendants of U.S. slaves and calling for corrective actions, Beck puts policymakers on notice that claims of ignorance, actual or feigned, are no longer an acceptable response to the costs of expansive immigration policy. He presents an opportunity for leaders to take accountability for the history that needs to be set right in the present.

Lineage versus Race

To appreciate the tone and argument of Back of the Hiring Line, the reader must understand the difference between lineage-based approaches to social policy and race-based approaches. For over twenty years, including in his 1996 book, The Case Against Immigration,⁶ Beck has advanced the idea that immigration disproportionately affects “black Americans.” Beck is referring specifically to the group of American citizens who descend from those people emancipated by America’s Civil War—the people whose enslaved ancestors comprised over 20 percent of the U.S. founding population.⁷ Upon emancipation, this group went from classification as chattel slaves (i.e., legally held property from birth to death) to the status of being free. With the commitment of Radical Republicans, the U.S. government created a protected class status—Freedmen—for emancipated slaves and their descendants. The govern­ment launched and funded the Freedmen’s Bureau⁸ to advance the so­cial, political, health, and economic stability of emancipated slaves and their progeny.

Data from Pew Research shows that American Freedmen composed nearly all of the U.S. black population through the 1960s and, after immigration surges, still comprise approximately 80 percent of the black population.⁹ When Beck speaks of “descendants of slaves,” he is center­ing the people who have a direct line of descent from U.S. chattel slaves and who themselves would have been subject to chattel slavery but for emancipation in 1865 and its supporting constitutional amendments.

In contrast, a race-based analysis subsumes all apparently black people into the multigenerational legacy of American Freedmen, no matter their connection to U.S. slavery. Through the racial lens, the original legacy of civil rights and the corrective economic measures coupled with it are conferred to black immigrants, too—no matter when they freely migrated to the United States (e.g., largely after civil rights were won in the 1960s).¹⁰

Beck argues that the consequences of this shift from lineage to race have been disastrous. Civil rights failed as a reparatory policy for Freedmen because policymakers did not attend to and honor obligations to black Americans with slave lineage. The unrelenting population change caused by unfettered immigration and the incorporation of new arrivals into Freedmen’s civil rights has diluted the potentially positive effects of reparatory policies for multiple generations. In addition, the political support for socioeconomic policies (like affirmative action), designed to undergird the stability and wealth of American Freedmen, has been compromised as these programs have been improperly expand­ed to black immigrants, “minorities,” and “people of color.”

Immigration versus Emancipation

By framing immigration through the lens of lineage, not race, Beck issues a challenge to policymakers to understand the impacts of migra­tion from a new historical perspective, and adjust their priorities to undo the negative impacts of recent policy. The first three-quarters of Back of the Hiring Line offers a robust and startling two-hundred-year account of racialized incidents, policy debacles, and outcomes data. It tells the tale of how immigration has negatively impacted the wealth and safety of multiple generations of American Freedmen.

As early as the 1820s, the anti-black prejudice of northern business leaders influenced them to pursue alternatives to black employees who were born free and/or were runaways from slavery, a pattern that has continued to repeat throughout history. Beck notes that in addition to employers of the industrial age seeking alternatives to native black talent, immigrants before and after the Great Wave (1880–1924) organized to keep free black people out of the workforce. To advance their own economic interests, immigrants advocated for the firing of free blacks and the eventual exclusion of emancipated slaves via ethnic labor unions and the threat of physical violence. Beck details a number of such incidents, including the New York City Labor Riots of 1834 and 1863. The violence and exclusion were so severe that

By the 1850s, for example, free Black workers had been driven out of most jobs on the New York City waterfront by the Irish immigrants who had gained control over the trades. Denied work through organized labor channels, Black workers increasingly resorted to securing employment by serving as strikebreakers—an unsavory role they had to endure for another century, and one that engendered further hatred from the immigrant workers.

The pushback even escalated to lynching as desperate African American strikebreakers fought for economic stability in the competitive labor market caused by rampant immigration and bias against freed slaves.¹¹ European immigrants also advocated for maintaining slavery and delaying emancipation.¹² Beck reveals the damaging role immigrants played in the Reconstruction era, an often overlooked part of history:

The steady annual addition of around a quarter-million Europeans mainly into the North during the 1870s did more than reduce the number of jobs open to the ex-slaves migrating from the South. It also helped shift the northern political balance against Reconstruction. It was the loss of support for Reconstruction from northern members of Congress that led the federal government to abandon attempts to force the South to allow full legal citizenship rights to the ex-slaves. . . .

Each year, the Republican Party’s power in the North eroded as hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered the region, with most throwing their political lot in with the Democratic Party and its strong opposition to southern Reconstruction. The immigrants then streaming into the major cities in the North from all over Europe had no guilty conscience over American slavery and were much more likely to adopt the anti-Reconstruction stance of the Democrats.

Immigration and Civil Rights

Repeating the post–Civil War pattern, in 1965, immediately following the passage of black civil rights and affirmative action, Congress started a whole new Great Wave of mass immigration with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act. In light of the previous history, one could argue that this was not coincidental, yet it is most important to focus on impact rather than intent.

A report published by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (usccr) during the Obama Administration made clear the impact immigration has had on multigenerational black Americans.¹³ In the 2010 report, the usccr found that

The economic adjustments unleashed by the large 1980–2000 immigrant influx, a labor supply shock that increased the number of workers in the United States by nearly 10 percent and the number of high school dropouts by over 20 percent, reduced the employment rate of low-skill black men by about 8 percentage points. Immigration, therefore, accounts for about 40 percent of the 18 percentage point decline in black employment rates. Simi­larly, the changes in economic opportunities caused by the 1980–2000 immigrant influx raised the incarceration rate of black high school dropouts by 1.7 percentage points, accounting for about 10 percent of the 20 percentage point increase observed during that period.

Today, mass immigration is once again harming the interests of multigenerational black Americans from multiple directions. On the one hand, libertarian talking heads argue that Republicans should resist calls for social justice for black Americans by increasing immigration, adopting the same indifference to lineage seen after emancipation and civil rights.¹⁴ At the same time, the Biden administration presides over a border crisis. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data revealed a record-breaking 1.6 million border encounters in fiscal year 2021. So far, during fiscal year 2022 (which ends on September 30), the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has experienced 1.4 million border encounters and is on pace to surpass two million.¹⁵ This is unsustainable.

Even at the higher end of the labor force, there have been significant negative effects of unfettered migration on Americans. In recent con­gressional testimony, Kevin Lynn of Doctors without Jobs noted that, annually, thousands of U.S.-trained medical doctors do not place for medical residency while, in 2021 alone, over four thousand foreign-trained doctors received U.S.-taxpayer-funded residency placements. Lynn explained that, in the last eleven years, the liberal use of J-1 cultural exchange visas has led Americans to unwittingly fund forty thousand foreign-trained doctors. As a result of competition, U.S. medi­cal doctors who do not match with a residency are unable to practice due to replacement by foreign sourcing. These are not “low-skill jobs that Americans don’t want to do.”

Nevertheless, reminiscent of the history Beck highlights from the Great Wave, some politicians have embraced expansive legal immigration and taken a soft-on-crime approach to illegal immigration. Demo­crats have advanced an omnibus spending package that allows for a near doubling of H-2B visa allotments to foreign nonagricultural workers. The “Dignity Act” (sponsored by Republican representative Maria Elvira Salazar, of Florida) floated another massive amnesty for millions of willful law breakers and visa overstayers.

In contrast, Beck highlights the government’s responsibility to regulate immigration to secure positive impacts on the lives and well-being of citizens. He advocates returning to “traditional immigration levels,” closer to the historic average of 250,000 to 300,000 up to an allotment of around 550,000¹⁶ legal migrants per year, as suggest­ed by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform chaired by the late Barbara Jordan. That would also be in line with the recommendations of President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. (From 2015 to 2020, the U.S. averaged over one million legal immigrants per year.) Beck, following many highly respected analysts and political leaders before him, including Jordan, supports “zero” as an acceptable number of illegal migrants.

What Would Barbara Jordan Do?

In the last three chapters, Beck resurrects the calls to action of black abolitionists and civil rights leaders. Their unapologetic message about immigration was clear: put Americans first.

The advocacy of Frederick Douglass, a former slave and presidential adviser, alongside other black icons like A. Philip Randolph and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, still offers the basis of sound policy today.¹⁷ In the generation following emancipation, Frederick Douglass, whose own family was displaced by biased immigrant-led labor unions, called for an immigration moratorium so that formerly enslaved Americans could find stable financial footing via competitive wages.

Leaders in the generations that followed amplified these calls. A. Philip Randolph, a leader of the labor movement, support­ed legislation to exclude non-Americans from working on railroads as servants. As historian Daryl Scott explains, “In the 1930s, the Pullman Company had often used Asians to weaken the [black-led] Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ union-recognition drive. After years of struggle, the Pullman Company finally began to negotiate with the Brotherhood in 1935 and contracted with them in 1937. Employees gained two million dollars in pay increases, a shorter workweek, and overtime pay.”

Barbara Jordan carried the mantle for sensible immigration policy into the next generation, chairing the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (the Jordan Commission). Jordan, in a 1994 speech, argued:

We [the commission] believe a credible approach to immigration must be comprehensive. First, border management. The second part of our strategy, worksite enforcement. As long as U.S. busi­nesses benefit from illegals on their workforce, they are not going to try to help us get on top of the problem. We believe employer sanctions must be made to work. The third part of our recommendations [is] immigrant eligibility for public benefits. Legal permanent residents should continue to be eligible for needs-tested assistance programs. If a person is here unlawfully, he should be entitled to no benefits. No benefits.¹⁸

Resolving the American Dilemma

Back of the Hiring Line is as much a call to American patriotism as it is a journalistic endeavor. The last three chapters, in particular, are an ideal place to start looking for policy solutions.

Beck issues a call to prioritize the descendants of slavery in labor sourcing. Beck rightly notes that many Americans hold a mistaken belief that affirmative action and civil rights have exclusively benefited the de­scendants of U.S. slaves. He argues for educating the public on why this has not been the case, and for pursuing corrective policy solutions. He quotes the National Research Council’s 1989 study on the state of black America, completed twenty-five years after the implementation of civil rights legislation: “Americans face an unfinished agenda. Black Americans remain separated from the mainstream of national life under condi­tions of great inequality. The American dilemma has not been resolved.”

Efforts to resolve this dilemma will continue to disappoint in the absence of immigration policies that prioritize American citizens. In tandem with reducing legal and illegal immigration, the U.S. government should reserve the already recognized protected class status of “Ameri­can Freedmen” exclusively for the descendants of U.S. slaves, and implement an “America first” agenda so that all U.S. citizens can thrive in the country we call home.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 3 (Fall 2022): 146–54.

Notes