Low-Income Blacks and Illegal Immigration
Do you agree with Professor Carol Swain that our immigration policy is a sell out to working class people and that it hits the African American community the hardest? I made the same point in an essay about Rep. (D-GA) John Lewis’ voting record on immigration.
TH-I first read the name “Carol Swain” while scanning a 2004 Boston Globe column by Cathy Young, who’d written about a panel discussion that took place around the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education – the Supreme Court case that outlawed government-mandated racial segregation in government schools.
Swain, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, talked about subcultural factors that impede the academic progress of black students, such as a lack of parental involvement in schools, the “acting white” phenomenon, and lowered standards and expectations. Quoting Swain, Young wrote that these factors “created a negative incentive structure for African-Americans who have either internalized societal messages about inferiority or have chosen an easier path of not exerting themselves too vigorously.”
While Swain probably wouldn’t describe herself as politically conservative, her ideas certainly are atypical of many liberals. She’s written about the negative effects of illegal immigration on low-income black Americans and the Congressional Black Caucus’s (CBC) stunning silence on the issue.
Swain accused the race-centric, taxpayer-supported caucus of turning a blind eye on a mounting pile of data that reveals illegal immigration is harming low-income, low-skilled black Americans. In a new book of essays, Debating Immigration, Swain contends that lax enforcement of immigration law helps businesses hire wage-suppressing illegal aliens at the expense of citizens.