“What they did in effect was wipe out all of the economic gains of Black folk during the civil rights movement,� says Dr. Claud Anderson, a coalition member and author of Black Labor, White Wealth.
Research on the claims of the coalition is mixed.

In a 2006 study, Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz estimated that the immigrant influx between 1980 and 2000 reduced the wages of the typical American worker by 3.4 percent. The wages of high school dropouts — a category in which Blacks are over-represented — fell by 8.2 percent. In the long run, high school dropouts will experience a wage reduction of 4.8 percent, the study concluded.

But a 2005 study by the Pew Research Center found that Black employment had not subsided in the six Southern states that had the highest Hispanic immigration growth rates in the 1990s. In addition, the study found that those states added jobs for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic workers at rates higher than the national average.

“African-Americans need to be cautious of being seduced into singing the collective song, ‘There is no more room at the inn,’� Larry Saxxon, the executive director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Resource Center, wrote in an op-ed published in the San Francisco Bay View. “This nation of immigrants’ should preface every sentence when discussing the issue of immigration in America.�

Others say the debate could create a division between two groups that should be working together.

“My greatest fear is that the current immigration battle in Congress ends up pitting the people with the least amount of resources against each other,� wrote columnist Eugene Kane in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “By that, I mean low-income African-Americans and low-income Hispanics — both U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants — all fighting over the same crumbs at the lowest level of the job market.�