Is Illegal Immigration the Greatest Threat to Blacks Since Slavery?

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media. Posted June 22, 2007.

Flamboyant arch black immigration foe Ted Hayes has repeatedly called illegal immigration the greatest threat to black America since slavery? This eye-catching, over-the-top, outrageous bit of hyperbole has set more tongues wagging than celebrity sex gossip. It will probably do more than that on June 23. It could start a riot. That's the day that Hayes and a handful of other black immigration opponents will march through a black neighborhood in Los Angeles trying to rally blacks to their anti-immigration banner. Immigration reform proponents have plastered the area with leaflets blasting the march and vow to confront the anti-immigration marchers.

Though the march is unique, blacks have been loudly protesting illegal immigration since it became a stormy national issue and ripped apart Congress last year. In May 2006, an odd assemblage of writers, preachers, a homeless rights advocate, professional anti-immigration advocates, and a few local black community residents from the Washington, D.C. area, grabbed some momentary camera time with a press conference in Washington, D.C. They called themselves Choose Black America and claimed that the overwhelming majority of black Americans agreed with them that illegal immigration was the prime threat to blacks.

This was hardly a spontaneous gathering of public-spirited blacks outraged over the impact of illegal immigration, and neither was their red-hot rhetoric against the bill. The Federation for American Immigration Reform paid for the airfare, hotel accommodations, and expenses for most of the participants as well as the rental fee for the press conference. The organization has long demanded the toughest possible immigration laws and the tightest possible border control enforcement. But the participants had made their point, and it was that there a few noted blacks that are willing to put their bodies and faces in front of a camera, and oppose immigration reform, and weren't scared at being branded bigots in the process.

Their Washington, D.C. flutter was the high water mark for the black immigration foes. With the death of the immigration reform bill in Congress, the group quickly vanished from the public's radarscope. However, when the Senate briefly resuscitated the bill in April, black immigration opponents got a new lease on life. The Los Angeles march gives them another chance to tap into the ambivalence, frustration, unease, and even anger among many blacks over illegal immigration.

The signs that illegal immigration touched a sore nerve in many blacks were there all along. The first big warning sign of black frustration with illegal immigration came during the battle over Proposition 187 in California in 1994. White voters voted by big margins for the proposition that denied public services to undocumented immigrants. But nearly fifty percent of blacks also backed the measure.

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.

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