“Work Americans Won’t Do”
by Glenn R. Jackson
Unemployment numbers among black American males rose between 2001 and 2002 by 2%. Unemployment among black Americans is now running nearly 10%. In the ages 16 to 19 years the rate is twice that of same aged white youths, being for black youths nearly 30%. The NAACP, in protest of the Ernest Hollings hoisted Confederate flag, has advanced an economic boycott of South Carolina’s tourist industry. The NAACP is greeting visitors at South Carolina’s welcome centers with protesters in an effort to “blockade” the state from the tourist dollar.
Ignoring a real threat in the here and now, the NAACP wages a war to morph Robert E. Lee into a skinhead, while giving cover to the economic plundering of the black community.
When the open borders/cheap labor advocates turn the phrase “work Americans won’t do” to support their advocacy of guest worker programs and blanket “amnesty”, to which “Americans” are they referring?
Each generation of American citizens uses the advances of their parent’s generation on which to build a life for themselves and their children. Each new generation wants to make more and create more for their family’s future. Whether you are an unskilled laborer, a skilled “craftsman, a white-collar worker or a professional, typical human nature inclines you to seek the next level for your kids.
However, what happens if in a moment in history two forces collide to destroy that dream for that next generation for an entire community of Americans? What happens if the bogus need for cheaper labor finds itself face to face with an irrational “victim” industry?
Well, you find yourself dancing the immigration “two-step” as you waltz around your own country’s citizens and import cheap foreign labor “to do the jobs Americans won’t do.”
American business has been doing an end-run on the American worker for years, closing plants and factories and moving them offshore. Equally devastating is the wink and a nod given by American businesses and politician to the importing of cheap labor through H-1B visas, mass immigration, and illegal immigration. This is a problem felt in small towns that lose their economic center, and in major cities whose economies in large part depend on well-paid consumers.
No demographic group has been more adversely impacted by the immigration waltz then has the black community. Clearly the largest grouping of unemployed in this country lie within the black community, and yet there is an immigration flood coming to America to “do the work Americans won’t do.”
With the civil rights movement of the 1960’s a generation of black Americans gave to their children a stepping-stone for the future like few other generations have been able to bestow on the next. Yet something has gone terribly wrong.
Instead of building one generation upon the work of the last, advancing each new generation to a higher level, the civil rights movement has stalled. Instead of creating new opportunity for the future, the civil rights movement tilts at vestiges of the past. Today the civil rights movement, as represented by the NAACP, finds itself pitting one group of Americans who see Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson in the Confederate flag, against another group of Americans who have been convinced that every dirt-bag “rebel without a cause” is embodied in an emblem.
Down Mexico way the President of the United States and the President of Mexico will meet. One to express his need for open and unfettered access across the U.S. borders for his country’s citizens, and the other to express his desire to help meet that need by surrendering his country’s citizens. Someone, at sometime during that meeting is sure to evoke the new open borders mantra “work that Americans won’t do”.
Meanwhile in America, parents searching to find the next step up the economic ladder for themselves and their family, must not only fight an encroaching wave, but a group fixated on bringing low a moment in history. South Carolina is a portrait in black and white, what impacts one will impact all. Already South Carolina’s black business owners are concerned about a boycott’s economic impact on their small businesses.
The black community must be able to improve its economic lot the way Americans have always been able to do, one step up the ladder at a time. Yet no one is speaking for the economic development of the black community.
Certainly the President and the “work Americans won’t do” crowds have made the decision to surrender black Americans for the promise from foreign lands. Instead of honest talk and efforts to find a solution for America’s citizens, the “work Americans won’t do” crowds are sidestepping their duty and placing their bets on importing the fix for their cheap labor needs and for a dodge around the victim industry. All of this in the face of Labor Statistics that show unemployment for “documented” Hispanic workers to be in the 8% range for 2002.
Why is the black community offering blanket “amnesty” to this open borders shell game?
Glenn R. Jackson is Chairman of the American Reformation Project, former State Chairman for Buchanan Reform and former state Chairman of the Georgia Freedom Party. Glenn also served on the Executive Committee of the Reform Party USA. Glenn holds an MA in Philosophy from Georgia State University in Atlanta.
© Glenn R. Jackson