Trump Doesn’t Know It, But ‘Black Jobs’ Are Thriving

Former President Donald Trump’s appearance at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago last week has become the gift that keeps on giving — mainly to Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in November’s presidential election. Trump’s claim that, “I will tell you that coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking Black jobs,” has been transformed into a mocking meme, with American super-gymnast Simone Biles, for example, declaring on X after winning the Olympic all-around gold that “I love my black job.”

But unlike many of the other things that Trump says these days (such as claiming that illegal immigrants are causing a crime wave when crime is in fact falling), his “Black jobs” comment does bear some link to reality. Immigration’s overall relationship to the labor market isn’t zero-sum — newcomers to the US create lots of jobs as well as fill existing openings — but multiple studies have shown that the arrival of less-educated immigrants, especially undocumented ones, can depress pay for those at the low end of the wage scale, which for much of US history has been occupied by Black Americans (when they were paid at all). A comprehensive roundup of such research published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in 2017 also included studies that found the opposite, and the group most affected by the arrival of new low-wage immigrants appears to be immigrants who arrived a few years earlier. Still, it’s not unreasonable to think that in some cases immigration has reduced Black employment or wages.