How MLK Would Have Responded to Our Immigration Debate
A core concern among immigration-control advocates has always been the disproportionate negative effects mass immigration has on black America. That concern takes on added significance as we commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who was singularly in tune with the needs of the black community... our current mass immigration system began to be implemented only in 1968, the year he died. According to his former lawyer and close adviser Clarence B. Jones, however, it’s clear what King’s response would have been. In his 2008 book What Would Martin Say? , Jones explores how the civil-rights leader might have reacted to the hottest contemporary political issues, immigration among them.
As a writer in The Atlantic observed in 1992, two years prior to the passage of California’s Proposition 187, which blocked public benefits to illegal aliens (with support from a majority of blacks ), “even if these communities [blacks and Hispanics in Los Angeles] make common political cause, do they have any choice about economic competition?” After all, the essay continued, “the almost total absence of black gardeners, busboys, chambermaids, nannies, janitors, and construction workers in a city with a notoriously large pool of unemployed, unskilled black people leaps to the eye.”...
Before he died, King had been a big backer of Cesar Chavez, the late-Sixties farmworkers’ organizer and one of the earliest campaigners against open borders. Right after King’s death, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, his replacement as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, marched with Chavez in a protest against illegal immigration over its suppressive effects on wages and its weakening of unions. According to Jones, King “would have agreed with” Chavez’s attacks on, what Jones calls our “wink-wink-nudge-nudge open border,” which “allows countless numbers of illegal immigrants to flood across and either take or undermine jobs done by Americans, especially brown and black Americans.” This shouldn’t be surprising, at least to those who know their labor and civil-rights history. The desirability of keeping cheap foreign labor out of the black labor market was a common refrain among King’s forebears, such as Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Those concerns persisted after King’s death. Notably, they were raised by his wife Coretta, who along with the NAACP in 1990 pleaded with Senator Orrin Hatch not to go forward with a plan to gut the prohibitions against illegal-alien hiring that had been put in place six years earlier by the Immigration Reform and Control Act. She was successful...
As for today’s so-called immigrant-rights [illegal alien rights] movement, writes Jones, King would have found its attempt to claim the mantle of civil rights to be an affront to his people’s genuine sacrifices. Jones imagines that King would’ve told groups such as La Raza, “I find it offensive and insulting when you wave Mexican and Salvadoran flags and compare yourself to civil rights demonstrators — black American citizens — who were denied their inalienable rights as Americans by those who hated them only and entirely because of their skin color.” “Amen,” immigration-enforcement advocates would say...