OPINION:
As the Biden administration continues its open border policy, much of the discussion has rightly been focused on who is being harmed. The body count is rising, whether from fentanyl deaths, crime, or immigrants dying in the process of entering the country illegally. Suburbanites are losing as the crisis spills out from sanctuary cities into their neighborhoods. Taxpayers are footing the bill for a massive expansion of welfare and government social programs.
Everyone is paying a price for President Biden’s abdication of his responsibility to enforce immigration laws and his party’s encouragement of historic levels of illegal immigration without material consequences.
Democrats’ push for more voters and using illegals as justification to deep blue cities with federal cash for big union backers trump all other interests.
Perhaps the biggest loser, however, will be America’s Black community. It’s worth larger recognition this Black History Month. Flooding the country with people from more than 100 other countries will mean further erosion of Black political power.
If Democrats continue to have their way at the border and get some measure of amnesty or fast-track citizenship on top of it, the impact will be catastrophic for the Black population.
Democrats have worked hard to keep Black influence in check for half a century now, first with the Great Society programs that expanded welfare dependency, and then with abortion, which has claimed the lives of more than 20 million Black children since 1973.
Now, they are being replaced by Democrats who need a much larger, reliable minority voting bloc to improve their electoral prospects well into the future.
The erosion of Black power in the United States should reveal for everyone the real intentions of leftists who talk big about equity and empowerment but ultimately view racial groups as a means to an end. Democrats can play the so-called Black national anthem before the Super Bowl, defend a corrupt Black president at Harvard, and meet every metric of diversity, equity and inclusion.
It’s all part of a ploy to make White liberals and young people think Democrats care about the Black community while the party intentionally diminishes their relevance.
Black Americans make up about 13% of the country’s population. The number of eligible Black voters has increased steadily but far more slowly than Asians and Hispanics. By 2050, Hispanics will outpace Blacks as an overall share of the population by 16 points. And that’s without some form of amnesty for the 9 million who have come across the border.
Perhaps the more troubling sign for the Black community is that, according to Pew Research, just over half of eligible Black voters live in Georgia, Florida, New York, California, North Carolina, Maryland and Illinois.
As populations shift and presidential politics require new strategies to win national elections, in 2024, all of those states are either reliably Democratic or Republican, with Georgia and North Carolina likely going Republican in November.
That means places where Black voters used to run up the score for Democrats matter less.
In battleground states such as Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Black voters were between 5% and 10% of the electorate in 2020.
Democrats will continue to erase Black political power even in cities, where they flex the biggest muscle, as liberals push noncitizen voting in city, state and local elections. This effort will pick up steam in the years ahead.
Illegals are flooding traditionally Black neighborhoods in places like Chicago. Expect that to be a natural consequence of allowing millions of foreigners into the country illegally.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bused about 80,000 immigrants into cities like New York, Washington and Chicago. That’s a fraction of the number of known border crossers.
The federal government won’t release where the Biden administration is resettling illegals, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think they are going to places that matter more electorally.
To add insult to injury, it was America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, who, despite talking tough on the border, set the Democratic Party on this path with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, so-called Dreamers, and changing the narrative on illegal immigration to make it more acceptable.
What makes you powerful in the blood sport of politics isn’t just raw numbers at the ballot box but how you factor in the money game. In addition to not living in places that Democrats need to win, Black voters aren’t big financial contributors.
Because of failed public school systems run by Democratic-aligned unions, failed housing and welfare policies that have sustained higher dependency rates and persistent underemployment, Black Americans are not increasing their financial relevance to the party either. Over time, new Hispanic donors will outpace them in the money race as well.
There’s a reason why today’s Democrats and even many Black leaders have abandoned the Rev. Martin Luther King’s axiom about valuing the content of one’s character over the color of one’s skin. A focus on building character leads to greater empowerment. An obsession with skin color, victimhood and White supremacy on the part of leftists is intentional, not for the purpose of promoting equality, but to hide their true motivations.
They use vulnerable people to obtain power, and when it looks like they’ve outlived their usefulness, they’re swapped out for another group to manipulate and take for granted.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax and a Washington Times columnist.
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