Gwyllem

Your initial blog as well as its headline seemed to infer that you believe that if unauthorized immigrants left tomorrow the companies and corporations would fill those jobs with Black Americans. As we both know the study completed last year by Pager, Western and Bonilowski showed that of all the groups studied Whites, Blacks, and Latinos that Blacks were the least likely to get callbacks after job interviews, when equally qualified.

If you believe Krikorian made “one piece of (admittedly very ugly) vitriol”, you don’t know Krilorian very well. Mark Krikorian wrote in the National Journal “the Haitians in Florida are certainly upset about this tragedy… That this is going to end up benefiting them immensely.” shortly after the Haitian earthquake in January.

Mark Krikorian ridiculed Justice Sotomayor for not anglicizing her name “Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English…” “[O]ne of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.”

You ask why you have to go to the far-right to get someone to talk to you for your blog. There are any number of people and organizations that are not on the far-right who you could have spoken to; however, they may have disagreed with your premise. And would not have given you the type of quote that pits Black and Latino against each other like Krikorian did.

Yes, there is any number of people on the far-right that you could have talked to and many are Mark Krokorian’s friends or colleagues in the John Tanton network. There is Wayne Lutton, who has been an active member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and is editor of the Social Contract Press, which Krikorian has written for. Or Roy Beck who heads another extremist organization founded by Tanton of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which took over $1.2 millon dollars from the Pioneer Fund (the Pioneer Fund promotes eugenics and financed ‘The Bell Curve”).

While they would have given you quotes you could use these white nationalists would note have given any more credibility to your blog than Krikorian did. If we are going to talk about what we should do to help Black America I would suggest we not start with the white nationalist crowd or their cronies.

By the way I was unable to find your Clinton reference anywhere. What I did find is, it was said that a friend of the late Sen. Kennedy said Clinton told Kennedy that a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee. It is stretching the truth to say Clinton called Barack Obama ‘a coffee boy’.

I am willing to give $500 to your favorite charity if you can show me where in my blog I referred to you as being anti-Latino.

Let’s take these in order:

1. I didn’t “conveniently ignore” anything. I didn’t include the paragraph because it wasn’t pertinent to my piece. Now, had I said, “Immigration is the only reason young black men are jobless,” then you might have a point. I’ll be the first to admit that there is a multitude of factors contributing to African American unemployment. Even you seem to agree with that, saying there are “real issues” (multiple) at the root of the problem. If that’s what you believe, however, why is it so wrong to posit that one of those reasons might be competition with illegal immigrants?

2. I didn’t “fail to highlight” anything. Here’s my exact quote: “From 2007 to 2008, though Latino immigrants reported significant job losses, black unemployment, the worst in the nation, remained 3.5 points higher.” As you can see, I state very clearly that Latino immigrants have suffered “significant job losses.” Apologies for not including the exact figures, but I’m not sure it’s playing fair to say I totally ignored that fact.

3. Right on–except for this: “The Pew report also states undocumented immigrants make approximately $14,000 per year less than the median household income of U.S. born residents.” It seems that you’re now ignoring a fact: in 2007, blacks were making almost $16,000 per year less than the median household income in the United States. Stats here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h05.html

4. I’m not sure what’s confusing about the inclusion of that study. I’m certainly not saying that “employers are all undocumented immigrants,” and I don’t know what gave you that impression. I’m simply providing evidence that proves employers are more willing to hire both whites and Latinos than equally qualified blacks. That’s a sad fact.

As for Krikorian, say what you will about his Haiti rhetoric (all of which I found reprehensible), but tell me what he said in my article that you found wrong. Tell me what he said in my article that couldn’t be backed up by the Princeton sociology study I referenced. If you’re willing to write off everything Krikorian does based on one piece of (admittedly very ugly) vitriol, I hope you’ll also disregard everything Bill Clinton’s done now that we all know he once called Barack Obama a coffee boy.

Your Krikorian attack does bring up one interesting question: Why does someone like me, who certainly looks left on most issues, have to go so far-right for interviews when researching an article like this? After bearing the brunt of a whole lot of irrational backlash, I’m starting to think I know why: Many people are blisteringly quick to conflate questioning immigration with being anti-Latino. You do it yourself here, claiming that I’m “blaming those least responsible.” I’m not blaming anyone; I’m just posing a question, one that many people seem afraid to ask. If anything, I’m blaming the employers, which is something I address very openly in this interview on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123811962

And for the record, I was serious about that John Edwards piece.