The Tragedy of Immigration

Andre Barnes, NumbersUSA’s HBCU Engagement Director, was asked how the border crisis is impacting Black communities. Watch his epic response.

NumbersUSA’s Hiring Line Initiative empowers voters to achieve an economically just immigration policy. Welcome to the Hiring Line newsletter!

Here’s a note from Andre:

What recourse do people have to speak to about immigration when civility is no longer trendy? You can be canceled, mocked, and disrespected for having a different opinion. Finding sensible immigration policy does not need to be a divisive topic. We can find common ground with factual information and civil discussion.

”The goal for our Hiring Line newsletter is to equip you with facts so you can confidently screen misinformation, take action, and be up to date about what is happening. Sensible immigration is possible. -- Andre

Andre was on The Chat to talk about the young, working-age men showing up at the border with babies but nothing to provide care for the children.

“I can’t go to the store with my month-old son,” Andre said, “without a bag of diapers - some milk - I would be lost….there’s no way that someone could travel that far with an infant with nothing.”

Children have become passports in the illegal immigration system designed and deployed by the Biden administration.

The late physicist Albert Bartlett, who would have been 101 years old this week, wrote about the “tragedy of immigration”:

“In significant ways, today’s tragedy of immigration is similar to the tragedy of slavery in our nation’s early history. Two hundred years ago the “civilized” world incorporated slavery into an economy that quickly became dependent on slaves ‘to do the work that Americans would not do.’...

“... It took more than a century of tragedy and turmoil to rearrange things so that the economy could function without the lowcost labor and the terrible injustice of slavery. Today the same economics is used as a justification for immigration. The business community wants a large supply of lowcost labor and a larger population of consumers.”

“It is time to rearrange things so that the work of the U.S. can be performed by U.S. citizens.”

Bartlett saw right through the sanctimonious “jobs Americans won’t do argument.” The ideological connection between mass immigration and slavery has a long history, and we have the receipts.

This is the biggest wave of immigration - legal and illegal - in history. As I write in the New York Post, there are echoes of 1924 in today’s crisis, and opportunities as well. But we need better leadership. That’s why Andre Barnes and the Hiring Line Initiative is committed to engaging Historically Black Colleges and Universities to equip the next generation to become leaders of sensible immigration policy.

Roy joined a panel with Mark Krikorian, Steve Camarota, and Rich Lowry to discuss the implications of the chart above. Roy told the story of a woman at a Chicago rally who chastised him for calling illegal aliens “migrants.”

“Migrants,” the woman explained, are the Black Americans who moved to the industrial North and West during the Great Migration, which (as you, dear reader, must know) was instigated by WWI and the end of mass immigration.

This history is breaking into the mainstream. The nobel-prize winning Economist Sir Angus Deaton recently acknowledged what the descendants of the Great Migration have long understood: mass immigration disrupts Black economic progress.

“We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress,” Deaton writes, “but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.”

Deaton’s comment is straight out of the Barbara Jordan playbook. We celebrated her birthday last month.

Thank you for all that you do,