Democrats and the media pounced after former President Donald Trump said during last week’s debate that illegal immigrants allowed to enter the country under President Joe Biden were “taking black jobs,” but the contention is backed up by a government report that found how the migrant influx has harmed employment opportunities for black Americans.

Trump said the up to “20 million people” who President Joe Biden has “allowed to come in through the border” are “taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.” Democrats claimed to be outraged at the phrasing. On MSNBC, Ja’han Jones, a writer whose main projects are discussing how there are such things as “Black hair” and “Black obituaries,” said “black jobs” was “racist and dehumanizing language.” Jones added that blacks would not want to take construction jobs because they would have to work too hard.

USA Today, which is currently advertising 100 jobs through its “Diverse Summer Internship Program” as “part of its effort to build more inclusive newsrooms,” wrote that “there’s no such thing as a Black job… there is no racial qualification for any job.”

In Forbes, Shaun Harper, a black professor and a self-described  diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) expert, wrote that “many Black Americans are noting how insulted they were by Trump’s notion of ‘Black jobs.’” He said black colleges can help train blacks for black jobs, and credited Biden for announcing that he would steer money to black universities.

They also argued with the substance of Trump’s statement, with the Washington Post saying that immigrants actually “gin up demand for goods and services, which strengthens the economy and creates the need for new jobs.” As evidence that immigrants were not taking blacks’ jobs, it said that “Black workers’ presence in lower-wage sectors such as leisure and hospitality and retail [has] decreased.”

However, a House panel heard last year that there are potentially an estimated nine million illegals in the workforce, and that the number of U.S. natives who are not even attempting to work is 10 million higher than it was in the year 2000. While the Biden administration has relied on positive employment numbers for blacks to make its case, unemployment rates only count people who are looking for work, not those who have simply given up and dropped out of the workforce.

“One of the things most striking about the enormous decline in native labor force participation is how little it is ever discussed, particularly when the need for more workers is mentioned. Our August 2023 report on labor force participation shows that … the total number of U.S.-born, working-age (16 to 64) men and women not in the labor force was 44 million in April of 2023, nearly 10 million more than in April 2000,” a presentation from the Center for Immigration Studies to the House workforce committee said.

It found that in particular, Americans at the bottom rung of the education ladder have dropped out of the workforce in large numbers over the last decades. Whereas high school dropouts might have worked low-skill jobs in a bygone era, now those jobs may be perceived as the domain of illegal immigrants, while an American underclass festers that has never worked any legitimate job, instead turning to crime and welfare.

The report presented numbers showing illegals vying with Americans and legal immigrants in large numbers, particularly in fields including carpentry, roofing, painting, and cooking. 

In 2008, a government commission also studied the exact assertion made by Trump. The United States Commission on Civil Rights produced a report on “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers.”

It found that “illegal immigration has tended to increase the supply of low-skilled, low-wage labor available,” and “that about six in 10 adult black males have a high school diploma or less, and are disproportionately employed in the low-skilled labor market in likely competition with immigrants.” It cited a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that “suggests that a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by almost a full percentage point.”

One researcher said “that both black Americans and illegal immigrants are disproportionately concentrated in many central cities of large metropolitan areas where job competition between them is likely to be extensive.” Another said that evidence suggests that some employers “prefer immigrants because of a perceived superior work ethic and tolerance for low wages” and pointed to the “desperation of illegal workers for any job” that pays more than what they would make in their home country.

Democrats’ and the media’s attempts to rebut the idea that adding 10 to 20 million people might take jobs that would have otherwise gone to Americans relied on studies that explicitly studied legal immigrants—including those who are granted visas because of their tech skills or specifically to found companies—instead of illegal immigrants, which is what Trump referred to. The other reports attempted to preserve the distinction, but acknowledged that accurate data that doesn’t blur the two groups does not exist.

In the debate, the moderator had asked the candidates to address “black unemployment.” Biden answered using similar phrasing as Trump, saying he would reduce the cost of “black childcare” in addition to “finding… these corporate operations that collude to keep people out of their houses.”