I don't believe there are any jobs that Americans won't take, and that includes agricultural jobs, says Carol Swain, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and author of Debating Immigration. [Illegal immigration] hurts low-skilled, low-wage workers of all races, but blacks are harmed the most because they're disproportionately low-skilled.
Despite President Foxs assertion, of the Pew Hispanic Centers top six occupational sectors for undocumented immigrants (farming, maintenance, construction, food service, production and material moving), all six employed hundreds of thousands of blacks in 2008. That year, almost 15 percent of meat-processing workers were black, as were more than 18 percent of janitors. And although blacks on the whole arent involved in agriculture at anywhere near the rates of illegal immigrantsa quarter of whom work in farmingabout 14 percent of fruit and vegetable sorters are African-American.
For their efforts, African Americans were paid a median household income of $32,000 in 2007. In the same year, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $37,000.