A report Monday in the New York Times said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s newly unveiled immigration policies might not sit well with black voters.
The reason: “Mr. Trump also called for an end to birthright citizenship, an idea other Republican candidates have avoided because it is hard to achieve and risks alienating African-Americans,” Times immigration reporter Julia Preston wrote. “It involves altering the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which allowed freed African slaves to become citizens after the Civil War.”
Preston did not return a request from the Washington Examiner media desk asking for any evidence that blacks have strong opinions about revoking birthright citizenship, which lets illegal immigrants give birth to children in the U.S. that can be automatically considered legal citizens.
Like the American public at large, a majority of blacks support U.S. immigration reform (including a path to citizenship for illegals), according to at least one 2013 survey conducted by the Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners.
But there are other studies that indicate a different dynamic between native-born blacks and immigrants. A 2013 study by Pew Research Center showed that 56 percent of blacks believe there are “strong” or “very strong” conflicts between immigrants and people born in the United States.
A 2009 study by George J. Borjas (Harvard), Jeffrey Grogger (University of Chicago) and Gordon H. Hanson (University of California, San Diego) offers one possible explanation for the perceived strife.
“As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined and the incarceration rate rose,” the authors wrote. “Our analysis suggests that a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 2.5 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by 1.3 percentage points.”
