Law Professor Carol Swain, of Vanderbilt University, recently edited the book Debating Immigration and has appeared several times on Lou Dobbs Tonight. In today’s Washington Times opinion piece, she excoriates the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for ignoring the harm that open borders and immigration permissiveness cause to black and low-skilled Americans. [Illegal Immigration's Harmful Effects, Washington Times, May 25, 2007 ]

African Americans should expect and demand more from the CBC, because its members have elected to organize as a racial caucus. By doing so, CBC members have placed upon themselves the obligation to represent the interests of the millions of black constituents who have faithfully and repeatedly sent them to Washington.

Instead, CBC members have ignored social-science studies, congressional testimony and census data documenting the harm that high levels of immigration have caused and are continuing to have on low-wage, low-skill workers. Intervention is needed. African Americans and their allies should hold CBC members and other Democrats accountable for failing to represent the interests of their constituents. [...]

We need only focus on unemployment to get an idea of how African Americans and other historically disadvantaged groups are adversely affected by high levels of immigration. Consider that black unemployment rates are usually double the rate of whites and are higher than the rates of Hispanics. For example, in April 2007, the national unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. The black unemployment rate was 8.2 percent, with the rate for black males at 9.7 percent. The rate for Hispanics was 5.4 percent. Moreover, the Bureau of Labor statistics has forecast that in the next seven years the Hispanic labor force will be 6.3 million workers greater than the black workforce. As well, by 2014, the black workforce will lag behind the Hispanics, Asians and white non-Hispanics in labor-force participation.

Furthermore, America has the highest percentage of poverty in the developed world: 12.7 percent. Why should we import additional millions of poor foreigners just so business can have slave-cheap labor?

Slashdot recently ran a straw poll. The only candidates to beat the joke candidate Cthulhu (Motto: Cthulhu for President. Why vote for a lesser evil?)were:

Ron Paul with a B rating from Americans from Better Immigration(and A- recent record)
and Al Gore with an A- lifetime rating.

The other candidates included:

• McCain is a D
• Hilary Clinton (despite tough talk) earned a D-
• Barack Obama also earned a D.

ABI is an interest group that advocates restriction of immigration–an F corresponds to loose immigration policy and a A to a restrictive policy. The average congressional grade is a C, which is in effect support of one of the loosest immigration policies in the world.

John K. Cooley writes at the Christian Science Monitor:

European-born Muslims and Muslim converts and Middle Eastern and North African Arabs often fight for Muslim causes in other lands: Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, or – since the US invasion of 2003 – Iraq. Thus far, the Islamist Hamas movement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shown little interest in the internationalist ideology of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, which preaches establishment of a global Islamist state. Since terrorist attacks by Palestinians in Europe a generation ago, very few, if any, Palestinians, Afghans, or Iraqis have turned up in violent groups operating in Western Europe. North Africans involved in terrorism in Spain and Italy and those of Pakistani origin or ancestry in Britain are often young people belonging to the second generation of immigrants. [How terrorism finds root in the West Alienation and radical European politics are factors. By John K. Cooley, May 23, 2007]

Cooley fails to ask the important question: Even if first generation immigrants are the focus of terrorism, could the US and EU select immigrants that are likely to be free of terrorist inclinations–or simply learn to live without much immigration?

The US gets 10,000,000 applications for immigration each year-and accepts around a million each year. I see no evidence the US is accepting those applicants most likely to contribute to the society here–and least likely to present a problem. Frankly, I don’t see any evidence anyone in power is making any serious attempts in that area–and they won’t until the public gives them every reason to be scared not to.

Statistics Canada, the Canadian Government’s Statistical Agency, published a report on Friday: Study: Impact of Immigration on labor markets in Canada, Mexico and the United States.

Immigration has tended to lower wages in both Canada and the United States…In Canada, immigration has dampened the trend to higher earnings inequality but in the United States, it has exacerbated it.
A key finding of this study is that there was a sizable, statistically significant, and roughly comparable inverse relationship between immigrant-induced shifts in labour supply and wages in each of the three countries.

The reason for the different income inequality consequence is that Canada’s immigration policy makes it comparatively easier for skilled workers to arrive and compete. As CanWest News Service puts it

In the U.S., however, immigrant labour is concentrated among low-skilled workers depressing their wages, and less so of highly-skilled workers, which served to magnify growth in US wage inequality, the report said.
In 2001, about four in 10 individuals with more than an undergraduate university degree were immigrants in Canada compared to only two in 10 in the U.S., it noted.

(Immigration depresses wages in Canada, U.S.: report Ottawa Citizen Eric Beauchesne Saturday May 26 2007.) Furthermore

The report also noted that significant illegal immigration to the U.S., especially from Mexico, and the fact that U.S. immigrants tend to be younger than Canadian immigrants, has also contributed to U.S. immigrant workers being lower-skilled than those who entered Canada

Three thoughts occur:

• How strange that the Congressional Democrats should generally so enthusiastic about a policy which so worsens the relative position of the lower skilled worker - as VDARE.com’s Randall Burns frequently laments.

• When was the similar official U.S Government study on this issue?

• At this writing, more than 30 hours after the publication of the report, Google News has found not one U.S. MSM story on the report. (Honorable arguable exception: David Frum, a Canadian, briefly referred to it in his NRO slot.)

Just like with the Oklahoma legislation, some immigration stories are apparently too relevant to disclose to the American Peasantry!

Update: George Borjas was involved in the study. He has discussed it on his blog, and provided a link to it [PDF]. Notable quote (P42):

immigration lowered the wage of high school dropouts by 7.1 percent, the
wage of workers in the middle of the education distribution by about 2.5 percent, and the wage
of workers with at least a college education by nearly 4 percent.

I read in Arthur Schlesinger’s book, The Disuniting of America, that Ishmael Reed had written that if Alex Haley, author of Roots, had “traced his father’s rather than his mother’s bloodline, ‘he would have traveled 12 generations back to, not Gambia, but Ireland’.”

Apparently this is true of Barack Obama, too. Erin O’Connor writes on Critical Mass that

There are far more Irish people living outside of Ireland than in it — the famine, and the hard decades afterward, meant that for many years Ireland’s population shrank rather than grew, despite the country’s historically high birth rate. They say there are more than 40 million Americans of Irish descent (compare that to today’s Irish population of about 4,000,000, a quarter of whom live in Dublin). When you get to talking to people about their ancestry, as I like to do, it sometimes seems as if just about everyone has some ancestor who came from a remote Irish village (”remote” being, in this phrasing, utterly redundant). So I wasn’t surprised to find out that Barack Obama is Irish, too.[Tiny Irish Village Is Latest Place to Claim Obama as Its Own By Mary Jordan Washington Post , May 13, 2007]

Obama’s great-great-great maternal grandfather was a shoemaker in Moneygall, County Offaly before he emigrated to the U.S. in 1850, hard on the heels of the famine. No word on whether Obama finds this information thrilling.

Probably not. He’s not, after all a position to become the first Irish President. Out of the variety of ethnic and national identities he could choose to identify with, Irish-American will be low on the list.