United States: black immigrant economic competition

Since the founding of the United States, but especially beginning in the late 1800s, economic competition among immigrants and the native-born has been sharply debated (see, e.g., Lieberson 1980; Portes & Rumbaut 1996). In fact, economic competition among groups - by race, ethnicity, nativity, religious affiliation, and the like - has been a theme of American-style capitalism for some time. As the US economy has ebbed and flowed over the decades and centuries, hostility and anger, especially toward immigrants, have also changed along with unemployment rates and new occupational structures. In fact, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed, in part, because of whites’ concerns about the prospect of being replaced by immigrant Chinese workers in several low-skilled industries (see Lee 2002). Additionally, the relationship between blacks and immigrants regarding economic competition - especially in terms of job competition - has become a key part of that debate in the last thirty years (see especially Lieberson 1980).