U Not Gonna Like This

More from The City Journal:




What’s behind the anger, as the Pew data hint, is the rapid change that legal and illegal Hispanic immigration is bringing to longtime black locales. Places like South Los Angeles and Compton, California, have transformed, virtually overnight, into majority-Latino communities. Huge numbers of new immigrants have also surged beyond newcomer magnets California and New York to reach fast-growing southern states like North Carolina and Georgia, bringing change to communities where blacks had gained economic and political power after years of struggle against Jim Crow laws. Since 1990, North Carolina’s Hispanic population has exploded from 76,726 people to nearly 600,000, the majority of them ethnically Mexican. In Georgia, the Hispanic population grew nearly sevenfold, to almost 700,000, from 1990 to 2006.



This Latino “tsunami,” as Los Angeles–based Hispanic-American writer Nicolás Vaca calls it, has intensified the well-founded feeling among blacks that they’re losing economic ground to immigrants. True, early research, conducted in the wake of the big immigration reforms of the 1960s, suggested that the arrival of newcomers had little adverse impact on blacks—one study found that every 10 percent increase in immigration cut black wages by only 0.3 percent. But as the immigrant population has in some places grown six or seven times larger over the last four decades, the downward pull has become a vortex. A recent study by Harvard economist George Borjas and colleagues from the University of Chicago and the University of California estimates that immigration accounted for a 7.4 percentage-point decline in the employment rate of unskilled black males between 1980 and 2000. Even for black males with high school diplomas, immigration shrank employment by nearly 3 percentage points. While immigration hurts black and white low-wage workers, the authors note, the effect is three times as large on blacks because immigrants are more likely to compete directly with them for jobs.



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