It is not that poor African-Americans are suffering from illegal immigration.  It is that all workers are suffering from the failure to enforce the existing minimum wage and health and safety standards, much less improve and strengthen those laws.

The biggest fallacy among leftist supporters of an immigration crackdown is that a crackdown will somehow be more effective in protecting workers' rights than simply enforcing wage and health and safety laws in the workplace.  Certainly if we could "punish employers who hire undocumented" we could also enforce wage and safety laws.  And I submit that would be a more direct and effective way of addressing the real problem.

Of course there is a great deal of racism in the current immigration debate -- and even today it is much easier to get legal papers to immigrate here from Europe than it is from Mexico, China, India or the Phillippines.  It is very encouraging, though really not surprising, that African-American leaders get it.

You know Harold Ford, Jr. voted in favor of making illegal immigrants "Felons".  

Talk about your fractures in Black Leadership.

Nathan Newman has more on this theme.

FYI

I often listen to a call-in talk show with a majority black constituency.  The immigration issue lit up the boards like very, very few issues do.  The audience is "liberal" but the overwhelming majority of callers were anti-immigration, mostly for the resons outlined above.  

Execution here not so good.

A good idea, that is, to show that bands of society suffer from illegals.

Not so good to say that getting rid of it all, or seeing partisan deadlock on the matter - is some kind of act of racism. The reforms that were up there weren't half bad. Why did they get torpedoed?

Also, its funny to see the post here  when the republican party was founded to end slavery. The whig party which was the precursor to the democratic party couldn't deal with the issue of slavery + it tore them apart.

Sure, there's racism but its directed against a broader mass of people than just the color of their skin. Ask those honkies up in North Carolina shoppin' at a walmart for chinese clothes next to that textile mill they used to work for..

Its institutionalized war corporatism - total 1984 type stuff going on. People being made perpetually afraid with the crawler on the bottom of their screens alerting them to everything + making them feel small and scared all the time.. Corporatism is worse than racism. It kills the earth, not just the citizens, certainly not just one color.

The immigration protests were effective for a few reasons that seldom occur in unison for protests.

The first is that they were somewhat spontaneous - that is, not planned for months ahead of time. The media was caught a little bit by surprise, and therefore the events were covered, which in turn is why anyone noticed them. Second, they were in many cities nationwide, not just in DC or some other big city. And last, they stayed on the damned message.

Liberals seem to have a chronic inability to stay on message. At the recent anti-Iraq war protests in DC for example, the speakers were talking about Haiti, Sudan, oppression of women in the third world, racism, and a host of other issues - all of which are incredibly important, but let's at least try to have a semblance of focus on actually ending the Iraq War. By the end of the thing, most people suffered from information overload, the media ignored it because they saw it coming for months, and it was in 1 city.

Just any old Protest will not do. Jerome and Markos are right on this matter in CTG.

I'd like to see more minority opinions on this site...

I am an African American worker and it is not just in the under educated class.  This is the propogander that the conserv media tells to Americans.  To justify their immigration. There is competition in factory work as well as teaching where they are closing down schools and forming perochial schools where hispanics and latinos can get more jobs over blacks and disassembling the Public schools.  Also, they are competing with us in the construction work environment, the mechanical environment, as well as office type work.  Get real, it isn't just under educated jobs, it is all over.  

to showcase the views of someone who isn't fully enamored with illegal immigrants.  I do wish he could have clarified what the anti-illegal immigration movement is, though.  I've heard about conservative culture/race baiting in various states in an attempt to bring prejudiced red state voters to the polls, but wasn't sure if this was an actual RNC-coordinated movement, or just separate situations.  The problem is that without clarification, there are many who are all too eager to lump anyone opposed to illegal immigration (including Tom Grayman) in with the racist xenophobes.

Want to second this. I had the privilege of working closely with California African American communities and Latino communities in 1994 against Prop. 187 (immigrant bashing much like Tancredo today) and in 1996 against Prop. 209 (outlawing affirmative action, mostly aimed at "unmerited" gains by African Americans.) Not only  did leadership groups understand that it was the same racists who backed these things, but on the ground the communities overcame significant suspicion to ally against both measures.

There are a lot of white obsevers that want to tell you that African Americans supported Prop. 187 (which drew Latinos into the electoral arena as HR 4437 has done today.) Not true. The most  trustworthy exit polls suggest that African Americans narrowly rejected the measure. And on affirmative action the results are unequivocal: even more Latinos voted against killing it than did Blacks.

This unity did not come easily, but in the end it came. That unity is a central building block of a future Democratic majority.