Members of the San Diego Minutemen hold signs as they protest the hiring of illegal immigrants in downtown Vista, Calif. Feb. 4. The Minuteman were protesting the hiring of "illegal" immigrant workers on street corners in the area. They plan to hold protests in other communites to put pressure on U.S. officials to crack down on illegal hiring. Photo: AP/Wide World Photos The idea that Black unemployment in the U.S. is ?historically unequaled? and the notion that immigrants choose to come here and cause labor market problems for Blacks betray a breathtaking ignorance of human motivation and of the way the global economy works.

Kasim Reed

As Black people, we ought to understand better than anybody how White supremacy works and how language, which frames the way we all think, is a potent tool of oppression or liberation. To start with, we need to purge the phrase “illegal aliens” from our vocabulary. Anybody who uses it within earshot ought to be challenged promptly and publicly, just like you would in a case of the unauthorized use of the n-word.

Aliens are from Jupiter. White America defines people as “aliens” in order to justify treatment unfit for a member of the human family, just as our ancestors were once labeled “property,” allowing “owners” to buy and sell us like cattle. For those so unable to free their minds from the box of White racist legalism that they cannot part with the adjective “illegal,” we should insist that they follow it with the correct noun that says what these folks really are. Illegal persons. Illegal people. Illegal humans.

And if “illegal human” sounds ridiculous and evil, as it ought to in any civilized ear, it’s only because White America’s law on this score is evil and ridiculous.

The idea that Black unemployment in the U.S. is “historically unequaled” and the notion that immigrants choose to come here and cause labor market problems for Blacks betray a breathtaking ignorance of human motivation and of the way the global economy works. In recent decades, we have seen the U.S. government openly aid and encourage manufacturing and service industry to shut down facilities and factories here and move them first to Mexico, then to the lowest wage overseas hellhole available. At the same time, billions of our tax dollars are paid in agricultural subsidies to agribusiness companies that dump their goods into Haiti, Mexico, Central America, Africa and Asia, killing the market for locally grown stuff and driving farmers off the land and into the cities where there are no jobs, health care or futures. Unemployment rates in Kingston, Jamaica or Dakar, Senegal are much higher than any experienced in Black America. A few of their daughters find work in the sweatshops. The rest stand around, hustle or starve, or emigrate.

Tens of thousands walk half the length of Africa every month trying to get to Europe. Can you imagine crossing the Sahara on foot? Chinese pay a couple years’ wages in advance to be packed into shipping crates that might or might not arrive here. Others walk from Guatemala and Chiapas, from Oaxaca and Michoacan.

Blacks have been on the bottom as long as there has been an America. Now, the globalized labor market is forcing us to share that bottom with other unfortunate folks. Should we rail against the Mexicans? Should we gripe about the Jamaicans, organize against the Filipinos and Arabs? Employers would like that and Republicans, too, even some Democrats. But we cannot escape the bottom by making common cause with the folks who put us down here.