President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” economy has given black Americans a boost over the last year in terms of wages, job opportunities, and labor force participation.
As Breitbart News has reported, Trump’s economic agenda has greatly tightened the labor market for the blue-collar and working class — the bottom 25 percent of the labor force — thanks to increased interior immigration enforcement that has driven down foreign competition against Americans.
Nearly 60 percent of black Americans in the labor force, as of 2018, are working class or lower-middle-class and compete against other lower-wage workers for jobs, thus are disproportionate beneficiaries of a tightening labor market.
As outlined by ZipRecruiter economist Julia Pollak, black Americans between 25 and 54 have increased their employment-population ratio from 75.1 percent in 2018 to 77.2 percent in 2019. Likewise, black Americans working full-time saw their weekly wages grow 4.3 percent in the last year.
(Screenshot via ZipRecruiter)
Still, despite calls from the big business lobby to import more foreign workers, there remain hundreds of thousands of black Americans who are still on the sidelines of the labor force, but all of whom want full-time jobs.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data finds that black Americans account for about 5.9 percent of the roughly 5.8 million Americans who are unemployed. This is nearly double the unemployment rate of white Americans and more than double that of Asian Americans.
The data suggests that though the bottom tier of the labor market has tightened, there is still room to bring millions more into the labor force rather than providing business with imported foreign workers.
Increased interior immigration enforcement, in multiple cases, has secured new job opportunities for often disenfranchised black communities. As Breitbart News reported, dozens of mostly black Mississippians arrived at job fairs at Koch Foods last year after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency conducted raids of illegal alien workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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