Donald Trump won a convincing victory over Kamala Harris largely due to record support from Black and Latino men. Trump won these votes because of, not in spite of, his immigration policies.
These predominantly working-class men intuitively understand that mass migration depresses their wages, increases competition for jobs and housing and overburdens their local communities.
President Trump and Congress can deliver for these voters — and all working Americans — by reducing overall immigration levels. That means preventing illegal immigration and lowering annual legal admissions. Reducing legal immigration is exactly what another Republican president and Congress did a century ago — and it led to massive economic and political gains for Black Americans.
The Immigration Act of 1924 signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge drastically reduced the number of foreign workers arriving on American shores. Annual immigration levels dropped nearly 60%, from 700,000 in 1924 to 295,000 in 1925. Over the next four decades, immigration averaged fewer than 200,000 migrants per year.
As a result, factory owners and hiring managers had no other option but to hire Black workers from the American South. After the law passed, roughly six million Black Americans hit the rails and roads in a “Great Migration” northward to a chance for better jobs and greater wealth.
Between 1940 and 1980, Black men’s inflation-adjusted incomes expanded four-fold, nearly twice as fast as white men’s incomes. The number of middle-class Black Americans more than tripled.
Contemporary Black political and labor leaders recognized that mass immigration was hurting their economic interests.
“This country is suffering from immigrant indigestion,” pronounced A. Philip Randolph, the great Black union leader. “It is time to call a halt on this grand rush for American gold, which over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race-riots and general social degradation.”
This flood of competition explains why Black leaders strongly supported the 1924 law. Just one year after it passed, Randolph’s The Messenger — the national-circulation, Black labor unionist magazine — declared, “Immigration from Europe has been materially cut, which means that the yearly supply of labor is much less than it formerly was. This gives the organized workers an advantage, greater bargaining power by virtue of this limited supply.”
Five years after the legislation passed, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in Crisis magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “(T)he stopping of the importing of cheap White labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American Black labor.”
The end of the Great Wave of European immigration allowed for the formation of the Black middle class. The resumption of mass immigration in the second half of the 20th century has contributed to the diminution of the middle class, hitting Black Americans especially hard.
In 1965, Congress transformed the nation’s immigration laws. Unfortunately, the Hart-Celler Act unintentionally ushered in today’s era of mass migration. A second “Great Wave” has disproportionately affected Black Americans by introducing competition for jobs, thus reducing both employment and wages.
There is ample evidence of the harm mass immigration has caused to Black Americans. Harvard economist George Borjas analyzed data from 1960 to 2000 and found that “a 10% immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 4%, lowered the employment rate of black men by 3.5 percentage points and increased the incarceration rate of Blacks by almost a full percentage point.”
President Trump ran on a promise to fix America’s broken immigration status quo. Working-class voters of all races gave him their votes. And their livelihoods depend on him keeping his word.
Eric Ruark is the director of research for NumbersUSA. This piece originally appeared in the Boston Herald.