Thread by @truthteller_x1

They call us “nativists” as if it’s a slur.

If it is wrong to be on the side of our fellow Americans, what is it to be right?

Coretta Scott King and the Black Leadership Forum wrote Congress urging not to repeal employer sanctions, warning cheap labor would devastate Black & Hispanic workers, drive down wages, and overwhelm cities already struggling with housing shortages. Read her letter.

In 1988, Kamala Harris’ father Donald Harris co-authored ‘Black Economic Progress,’ warning that immigration laws flooding the U.S. with low-skilled workers were a ‘particularly serious problem for blacks’ competing for jobs.

Seems pretty “nativist” to me.

In 1994, Barbara Jordan chaired Clinton’s immigration commission and recommended cutting immigration by a third, declaring it ‘a right and responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.’

Cesar Chavez, the iconic Latino labor leader, organized ‘wet lines’ along the Arizona border to stop undocumented crossings, reported undocumented workers to immigration authorities, and launched an ‘Illegals Campaign’ to protect farmworkers from cheap labor undercutting wages.

Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, warned: ‘Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger is thought to give him a better title to the place.’ A formerly enslaved man fighting for Black workers’ jobs.

W.E.B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, called the immigration slowdown of the 1920s ‘the economic salvation of American black labor.’ The father of modern civil rights understood that a tighter labor market meant higher wages and more opportunity for Black workers.

Booker T. Washington, born into slavery, pleaded with industrialists in his famous 1895 Atlanta speech not to look to foreign immigrants to man their factories, but to hire the loyal labor force already in the South. He knew cheap imported labor would undercut Black workers.

In 2015, Bernie Sanders called open borders ‘a Koch brothers proposal’ and said ‘it would make everybody in America poorer.’ He warned that corporations want to ‘bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour.’ Bernie understands cheap foreign labor undercuts Americans.

In 1751, Ben Franklin warned that importing foreign workers when Americans already need jobs means ‘they will gradually eat the natives out.’ The man on the $100 bill understood that flooding the labor market with cheap foreign labor undercuts the workers already here.

Samuel Gompers, immigrant, founder of the AFL, and anti-socialist, fought for decades to restrict immigration, warning corporations were ‘flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.’

Calvin Coolidge, conservative icon of small government and low taxes, signed the Immigration Act of 1924, saying restriction ‘seeks to shield our wage earners from the disastrous competition of a great influx of foreign peoples. This saves the American job for American workmen.

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