Black Lives Matter (BLM) Boston seeks to sizably cut its city’s police budget and reappropriate $15 million in taxpayer funds – including those from black Americans – for an initiative to “hire undocumented young people” for thousands of summer and year-round jobs.
Undocumented workers and mass migration are a catalyst for wage depression and high unemployment plaguing black communities, as noted by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Co-authors George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson wrote in a paper entitled ‘Immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment, and Incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks’:
The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally ‘explains’ about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less.
Calls to “defund the police” have proliferated nationwide in the wake of George Floyd’s death, yet most BLM activists fail to outline what would happen if the radical stance was to materialize.
The Boston chapter of the left-wing mega-donor George Soros-funded organization, however, provides insight on what BLM hopes to reappropriate the funds for:
The City should fund $15 million for 5000 summer jobs and 1000 year-round jobs lasting from September to June, including hiring 14-22 year olds, hiring undocumented young people, and providing grants to organizations.
The funds would come from cutting “the police budget by 10% from $414 million to $372 million or less, including cutting at least $40 million from the Police Department’s $60 million overtime budget,” significantly less radical than most of BLM’s chapters.
Originally written by the Youth Justice & Power Union, the petition has amassed over 1,500 signatures.
https://www.facebook.com/BlmBoston/posts/1770218986435289
Beyond BLM championing policies that often result in higher crime and homicide rates in black communities and obscuring the overwhelmingly more present phenomenon of black-on-black violence with the “myth of systemic police racism,” pushing for this wage-depressing policy is just the latest harmful policy the group has embraced.
Not to mention, the policy would grant tax dollars – even those from black Americans – to provide a steady income flow for individuals who aren’t even U.S. citizens.
President Barack Obama’s own Federal Commission on Civil Rights report, “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers,” concluded:
…illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men.
This results from the fact that “about six in 10 adult black males have a high school diploma or less, and black men are disproportionately employed in the low-skilled labor market, where they are more likely to be in labor competition with immigrants.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research corroborated immigration’s detrimental impact on the prospects of black workers and even linked immigrant influxes to spikes in black incarceration.
It stated: “Why would a boost in immigration effectively put more men, especially black men, behind bars? The authors put forward a straightforward theory: immigration causes wages and employment to fall for black workers. When this happens, some of those workers — especially those with the lowest skills — turn to crime to increase their income.”
Left-wing Politico magazine even conceded: “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”
Contrary to BLM’s narrative, black workers and wages do matter, and should not be sacrificed at the alter of socialism for the sake of political posturing.
Natalie Winters contributed to this report
