When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, agricultural workers, cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, day laborers, custodians, housekeepers, etc., were disproportionately black men and women, as well as many assembly line and construction workers, living in safe neighborhoods with two parents raising children.
In my dissertation, Caste, Class, and Justice: Segregation, Accumulation, and Criminalization in the United States, published in 2000, which explored a caste-class model of capitalist dynamics, I incorporated elements of the split labor market theory, proposed by sociologist Edna Bonacich in the early 1970s, which explains how labor markets are divided along ethnic, racial, or other social lines. Bonacich theorized that labor markets are split when employers exploit cheap labor, which often comes from minority groups or immigrants, over more expensive native or majority labor. This division creates division in the working class. At the same time, it provides stable employment for those relegated to it.
The theory posits that the dominant group, fearing economic competition and wage reduction, reacts by forming unions, lobbying for restrictive immigration policies, or supporting discriminatory practices to protect their material interests. Employers benefit from this situation as it suppresses wages and disrupts labor unity, generating greater surpluses and making it easier to control the workforce. The theory helps explain the persistence of ethnic and racial conflicts in labor markets and the structural economic forces that perpetuate discrimination. It highlights how economic factors drive and maintain divisions within the workforce.
Today brown immigrants work the jobs blacks used to work at, while millions of blacks are idled in the crime-ridden ghetto of the blue city, their children raised without fathers in the home, with one in three black men earning at least one felony conviction over the life course, many engaged in constant gang warfare. Black men commit most murders and robberies in the United States. This is the result of corporate globalization, off-shoring manufacturing and importing cheap labor, justified by multiculturalism, and Democrats relegating blacks to disorganized inner city areas and progressives addicting them to welfare, creating a subject class who votes for a living instead of working for a living.
The historic shift from black labor to immigrant labor in the United States can be analyzed through the lens of the split labor market theory. This shift is particularly evident in industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, and service sectors. Historically, black labor, especially in the post-Civil War South, was a significant part of the labor market. Black workers were often employed in low-wage, labor-intensive jobs. However, with industrialization and urbanization in the early 20th century, there was a growing demand for labor in northern cities, leading to the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North.
Crucially, during the 20th century, US immigration policy underwent significant changes that spurred black migration to urban centers beyond the South and then later transformed them into redundant labor. Early in the century, there was a rising tide of nativism driven by fears of cultural and economic displacement due to increasing immigration. This led to legislative measures such as the Immigration Act of 1917, which introduced literacy tests and barred immigrants from much of Asia. The most restrictive phase came with the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national origins quotas. These quotas favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe while severely limiting those from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. This era of restrictive immigration policies continued through the mid-20th century, coinciding with the Great Depression and World War II, when economic and security concerns further dampened enthusiasm for immigration.
During this period, capitalists in both the North and the South sought cheaper labor alternatives to black workers who had benefitted from economic development during this period. Changing attitudes towards race in the 1960s that promised gains for black Americans were exploited to push open borders. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, abolished the national origins quota system. The 1980s saw further action with the Refugee Act of 1980, which aligned US policy with international standards for refugee protection, which open border activists used as cover for the recruitment of economic migrants, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants while imposing stricter border controls (easily skirted by subsequent presidents) and sanctions on employers hiring undocumented workers.
As immigration from Latin America increased in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Latino workers became the dominant source of cheap labor, Hispanics eventually becoming the largest minority group in America. This shift further marginalized black workers across sectors and maintained the racialized division of labor. Employers continued to benefit from this dynamic by keeping wages low and exploiting the vulnerabilities of immigrant labor, who often had fewer legal protections and were more susceptible to exploitation.
In numerous essays published in Freedom and Reason, I show how the greatest period in American history occurred between closing the borders in 1924 and reopening them in 1965. The period was marked by rising wages and standards of living, safe and orderly communities, racial integration, women’s rights, and a high level of patriotism. Black Americans gained as never before during this period.
I have documented that the desire for open borders was a transnationalist plot to disorder America dating from the early 20th century (see, e.g., An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion; The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate; The Progressive Politics of Mass Immigration). It was also a scheme to drive down wages for workers which, in the context of the split labor market, proved devastating to workers.
Progressives can mock the shorthanding of “black jobs” all they want, but they can’t change the facts of the corporate destruction of the black family and the managed decline of the American Republic. That is what Donald Trump is talking about. If Democrats represented black Americans, that’s what they’d be talking about, too. But they don’t. So they mock. It’s all they’ve got.
freedom and reason 