WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump warned during his debate with Joe Biden and again at a rally on Friday, where immigrants took away Americans’ “black jobs” and “Latino jobs,” angering critics who called it a racist and insulting attempt to broaden his appeal beyond his white conservative base.
While President Joe Biden’s faltering debate performance Thursday night raised widespread concerns among fellow Democrats about his readiness, Trump also repeatedly made false claims and reiterated conspiracy theories he long promoted during his campaign.
Trump has suggested without evidence that Democrats want immigrants to displace Americans as voters, and he has described the state of the nation under Biden as worse than during the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump has frequently downplayed the racist undertones of the march, once saying that there were “fine people on both sides.”
Trump’s portrayal of a country on the brink, besieged by unbridled migration and ravaged by racial conflict and economic chaos, echoes his years of rhetoric about the state of America. It’s a pessimistic vision that has long appealed to the Republican Party’s predominantly white, far-right base but has also alienated other Americans, particularly voters of color.
“The fact is, his great killing of black people is the millions of people he’s allowed to come in through the border. They’re taking black people’s jobs right now,” Trump said during the debate on CNN. “They’re taking jobs from black people and they’re taking jobs from Hispanics. And you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that will be the worst in our history,” he warned, without specifying the danger.
Still, Trump and his allies believe such rhetoric could have more appeal this year to Black and Hispanic communities, who are dissatisfied with Biden’s performance in office. Trump repeated the comments at a rally Friday in Virginia.
The phrase “black jobs” was widely condemned by Democrats and black leaders as vague and offensive.
“I still wonder what a ‘black job’ is,” Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison joked Friday during a news conference with former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Atlanta. Other prominent Biden allies, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Tx., Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., also condemned Trump’s remarks after the debate.
“There is no such thing as a black job. That misinformed characterization is a denial of the ubiquity of black talent. We are doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, police officers, firefighters. The list goes on,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. “A ‘black job’ is an American job. It is troubling that a presidential candidate would make a distinction that does not exist. But the divisive nature of this comment is not surprising coming from Donald Trump.”
Trump’s allies pushed back on the criticism, saying they missed the president’s broader message.
“He was referring to black people’s jobs. And we’ve been using that term for a while,” said Diante Johnson, president of the Black Conservative Federation. “It’s every job. Instead of black people having unlimited access to all kinds of jobs, illegal immigrants are taking their jobs away from them.”
Much economic research shows that immigration has helped increase employment. A 2024 paper by economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri found that immigration had a positive effect on the wages of lower-skilled workers born in the United States between 2000 and 2019. Still, separate research has suggested that greater immigration may have hurt wages for less-educated black men, although this was one factor among many.
Asked to clarify what Trump meant by describing a “black job” during an interview with NBC News, Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is Black and is being considered to be Trump’s vice presidential nominee, dodged the question and instead discussed homeless veterans.
Some Black adults think there’s a chance immigration will hurt job opportunities for workers already here. About four in 10 Black adults say there’s a “major risk” that the number of jobs available for American workers will decline when immigrants come to the U.S. — whether they arrive legally or illegally — according to a March AP-NORC survey. But the poll also found that about three in 10 Black adults think it’s a major benefit that immigrants take jobs that Americans don’t want.
In some communities like Chicago, increased numbers of migrants have led to greater economic anxiety and concerns that government resources are not being distributed fairly. Still, black and Hispanic Americans are, on average, more supportive of immigration than other demographic groups, and in cities like Chicago, Denver and New York, racial justice groups have been at the forefront of mitigating potential conflict between communities of color and undocumented people over issues like jobs.
For some black activists, the comments did little to change the state of the presidential election.
Michael Blake, founder and CEO of the Kairos Democracy Project, said: “It’s hard for anyone to believe that (Trump) means he’s hiring quality jobs.”
“It is our responsibility to tell the story about the benefits of diversity, rather than the fears of it. And the idea of those people taking you away is a message that just creates fear, instead of asking, ‘How do we all win?'” Blake added. “If you embrace all races, we all win. We must not allow fear of the past to override prosperity of the future, because we can all win.”
