I’m pretty astonished that this letter was even considered for publication in the WSJ. Here’s the text if it’s blocked for you (I’m a subscriber, you might not be).
Arthur Lafffer’s “How to Fight Black Unemployment” (op-ed, Sept. 12) glaringly omits the current root cause of plummeting employment rates in America’s black population; namely, the war we are losing within our borders by not managing our immigration policies.
The fundamental challenge facing America’s black communities is the shift of the overall labor supply pool since the 1980s, resulting in lower wages for unskilled workers and a tsunami of illegal immigrants who now compete head-on with blacks across America. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s the labor-force share of blacks in Los Angeles was 35%. Today it has shrunk to 6%, while the Hispanic share is 43%.
The cumulative creaming off of opportunity and wealth from poorer blacks to other groups has done immense damage in the black community. In addition, many low-skilled manufacturing jobs that would have been available to blacks in, say 1980, have moved overseas, taking the wealth they provided with them. There’s not much we can do about the globalization of manufacturing, but it is urgent for our policy makers to address the correlation between the tragedy of black unemployment and the lack of good immigration governance.
Rob Sobhani
So we need to better enforce laws to segregate Hispanics in order to preserve jobs for Blacks. This is the new Jim Crow; instead of segregation to protect White jobs from Blacks, we’re protecting Black jobs from Hispanics.
Somehow, though, it’s OK? Somehow this is part of a serious political discussion in the editorial pages of a National newspaper?
I don’t think it is OK. Not at all.
Windy Recycling Day 