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In the first article in this series, we examined the shameful fact that Republicans and conservatives have pretty much written off minority voters as hopelessly in thrall to the Left. If that's true, and to be a minority inevitably means voting for big-government socialism, then conservatism might as well just shut down.
But that's silly. Is it rational to give up on something before we've even tried?
The fact is, conservative principles benefit everybody regardless of color. There are many specific conservative policies that would directly and visibly benefit America's black community. Let's take a look at one crystal-clear example: immigration.
The depiction of low-end service and agricultural jobs as "jobs Americans won't do" has been repeated so many times that almost everyone accepts it as Gospel truth. You don't want to pick lettuce all day in a hot field; I don't want to do that; therefore nobody except an uneducated, illiterate peasant would stoop to something so unpleasant. If we want our lettuce we need our illiterate Mexicans.
It's all too easy to forget that there was a time before America had millions of illegal Mexicans perched in the economic shadows. The America of 1960 ate lettuce and had their lawns mowed too, didn't they?
It wasn't done by illegal Mexicans: it was, instead, by American citizens, many of them black. In large part because of racist Jim Crow laws, many blacks were little better educated than today's illegals and held most of the same jobs.
Times move on, and Jim Crow is long gone. Instead we have a problem even more insidious though less blatantly evil: inner-city minorities can't find jobs that can support a family with the education they receive at failing inner-city schools.
America's educational failures are a topic for another day. Simple logic dictates that illegal immigration, and a fair bit of the legal sort as well, steals jobs from America's lower classes - predominantly minorities. If there weren't illegal Mexicans willing to harvest crops for pennies, the farmers would be forced to offer the jobs to citizens at minimum wage or higher.
You see, there is no such thing as a job Americans simply won't do. There are merely jobs Americans won't do for too little money. Raise the salary enough and you'll find an American willing to take the job no matter what it is.
On those rare occasions when the left even admits that immigration might be connected to employment, the claim is made that immigrants create as many jobs as they take and so things cancel out.
Common sense says that isn't so. We have somewhere around 12,000,000 illegal Mexicans in the United States. Most of them must be working, since they can't all collect welfare and they all have to eat. Are open-borders advocates seriously arguing that they've created 12,000,000 other jobs in replacement for the ones they're doing? That's absurd!
If we deported all 12,000,000 illegals tomorrow, there would unquestionably be some jobs lost; after all, illegals buy things too. But there would be far more jobs freed up for American citizens by removing the illegal unlawfully occupying these positions. It has to be so: no person can spend more than they make, particularly not an illegal with limited access to the financial system, and especially not when illegal immigrants send billions of dollars home to Mexico that vanish entirely from the American economy.
Yes, there are stereotypical black Americans who want nothing more than a welfare check, a sofa and a TV, just as there are white Americans equally lazy. But there are plenty of jobless black American citizens who would appreciate a job if they could find one.
There are even an increasing number of black Americans who are realizing that illegal Hispanic immigration directly threatens their prospects. This dawing understanding shows up in simmering racial conflicts, even ethnic cleansing reported in once-black neighborhoods in California. Since neither political party is willing to address the issue, ill-educated and resentful people are taking matters into their own hands with unfortunate results.
Isn't there a better way? Why can't conservatives reach out to their black fellow-citizens whose jobs and livelihoods are being taken by illegal immigration? You might say that such an outreach is doomed to fail - but since nobody's ever tried it, why not give it a shot?
And America would be the better for it.
In the next article in this series, we'll talk about how conservative views on education could make all the difference in the world to the black community.