Trump's sly attempt to pit Hispanics, African-Americans against immigrants
Whatever. Trump's insistence on a barrier in his pitch to racial and ethnic minorities sounds better suited to 1919 than 2019. During the Industrial Age, black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey occasionally spoke out against immigration, mainly against the preference by too many industrialists for immigrant labor instead of training and employing native-born black Americans.
In war and peace, blacks often were the "last hired, first fired," as an old saying of the civil rights movement goes, unable to enjoy the benefits of long-term employment except as a last resort.
As opportunities in employment, job training and union membership opened up nationwide, particularly in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, black leaders found it made more sense to ally with other ethnic groups to try to expand opportunities for everyone. Black Americans did not invent what is often called "identity politics" today. They only found ways to turn it into a tailwind for progress instead of a headwind against their aspirations.
You can see the impact of that shift in polls such as one taken by Lake Research Partners in 2013, which found that 66 percent of African-Americans favored a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, including the undocumented, quite the opposite of Trump's hard-line, build-that-wall approach.
And need I mention that black and Hispanic voters overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump -- 89 percent of black voters and 66 percent of Hispanic voters -- and his message to African-Americans of "What have you got to lose?" As we have seen under Trump's divisive policies, they could lose a sense of unity as Americans around a commonly shared American dream of opportunity.
If anything, most voters -- minority and otherwise -- want to see some sort of comprehensive immigration reform that improves border security and also resolves the unsettled status of law-abiding immigrants who already are here with some sort of pathway to legalization -- beginning with the "Dreamers" who were brought here without documents as children.
That's the real issue behind the current border wall standoff. President Trump has shown himself to be tone-deaf or sadly indifferent to the need for compromise and consensus in our very diverse country on those broader issues. He apparently prefers to win by division more than addition.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
