Former President Donald Trump claimed during Thursday’s presidential debate that immigrants entering the United States illegally were taking “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” a baseless claim that Democrats immediately seized on as evidence that Trump and Republicans were not serious about recruiting support from voters of color.
It also spawned a slew of internet jokes and memes about what exactly constitutes a “black job.”
“They’re taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history,” Trump said Thursday, referring to migrants crossing the southern U.S. border. He then repeated the reference Friday at a campaign rally in Virginia, adding that black Americans who have had jobs “for a long time” are losing their jobs to immigrants.
Sign up for the New York Times Morning newsletter
Black political strategists, elected officials and organizational leaders quickly joined hundreds of social media users in posting photos of themselves in their workplaces and joking about the relativizing and racist nature of the former president’s comments.
Among them was Democratic House Representative Stacey Plaskett from the U.S. Virgin Islands, who posted a photo on social media platform X on Friday with two women in her congressional office, captioning it: “Another day in Congress doing our ‘black jobs.’”
Malcolm Kenyatta, a Black Democrat from Pennsylvania and a campaign surrogate for President Joe Biden, joked: “Have we ever figured out what a ‘black job’ is? People ask me.”
And Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, also criticized Trump’s comments, writing on X that Black Americans “are not limited to one #BlackJob.”
Republicans, who have sought to capitalize on Biden’s dwindling support among Black voters, have made the immigration issue a cornerstone of their appeals to the bloc, whose turnout in November could decide the election. Trump has said that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and has repeatedly claimed that the migrants crossing the border into Mexico are refugees from prisons and mental institutions, something the evidence does not support.
Immigrants have made up a growing share of the U.S. workforce in recent years, but economic experts say their presence has been healthy for the country’s economy. And while Trump has argued that immigrant workers are stealing jobs from U.S. citizens, the country’s foreign-born workforce is not large enough to offset the job creation of the past three years.
Democrats have increasingly gone on the offensive. In a statement, Biden’s communications director, Michael Tyler, pointed to the online flurry of reactions to Trump’s comments, saying that black voters “swept Trump away all night because of his racist tirade.”
“They know Trump has done nothing for black communities, so he’s trying to pit communities of color against each other as a distraction,” he said. “We are not distracted. We see Trump’s racism clearly, and that is why black voters will reject him in November.”
ca.2024 The New York Times Company
