Coretta Scott King: Amnesty ‘Devastates’ Economic Conditions for Blacks, Other Minorities

Two years ago, Northeastern University Professor Andrew Sum, the school’s Center for Labor Market Studies director, estimated that for poor African-American teenage, high school dropouts the likelihood of having a job was 5 percent.

Sum, a nationally recognized labor expert, found that aggregate teen employment doesn’t follow the economy’s normal up and down trend as jobs are added or subtracted from month to month. Instead, Sum’s research concluded that the younger the worker, the more probable it is that he or she is a labor market reject. Consequently, employment rates for 16, 17, and 18-year-olds have dropped to about half of what they were in 2000. The downward teen jobs spiral began after the boom ended in 2000, and according to Sum, the 2007-2009 recession “destroyed” the labor market for young people. And since the nation began to add jobs after 2009, teenagers received almost none of them in comparison to previous historical levels.

The more limited a resume a prospective employee presents, such as a lack of a high school diploma, the more remote the chances of being hired—therefore, the plight black, under-educated teens find themselves in. Long-term effects of black teen drop out unemployment are also worrisome. Sum found that as young adults, kids without high school diplomas will have  poorer work records, work much less, have fewer skills, earn less, and be less likely to be married while more likely to stay at home.

One under-analyzed variable that hurts teens is the increase since 2000 of available legal immigrant labor. At an average rate of nearly one million employment authorized immigrants each year, 15 million new workers have entered the market during the last decade and a half. In addition to the average legal immigration rates, President Obama gave work permission to more than 600,000 young illegal immigrants through his 2012 deferred action for childhood arrivals program. And the recently passed $1.1 trillion Omnibus bill quadrupled the number of H-2B visas to more than 250,000 for low-skilled, non-agriculture workers in construction, housekeeping and manufacturing that will further adversely affect jobless black teens’ prospects.

Not that long ago, liberals defended American workers, especially poor, struggling blacks. Among the pro-America leaders was Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta. For example, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act required that in exchange for amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants, employers who hired aliens would face severe penalties. The quid pro quo was designed to protect American workers including the recently amnestied immigrants. But immigration advocates claimed sanctions would cause discrimination against Hispanics. Just as the Senate was about to abolish the employer penalty provision, Coretta Scott King wrote a scathing letter to Congress on behalf of the Black Leadership Forum and eight other civil rights champions. Mrs. King wrote that repealing the sanctions “devastates the economic conditions of un and semi-skilled workers, a disproportionate number of which are African-American and Hispanic.”

Mrs. King’s courageous comments ring as true today as they did in 1991 when she wrote her letter. Congress should be intent on American job creation, not flooding the labor market with illegal immigrants that vie with unemployed and under-employed workers, most notably blacks. Five years after his “I Have a Dream” speech, King eloquently said in one of his final sermons, “If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”