Former President Donald J. Trump claimed during Thursday’s presidential debate that immigrants who entered the United States illegally were taking “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” a baseless claim that Democrats immediately seized on as evidence that Trump and the Republicans were not serious about recruiting support from voters of color.
It also spawned a series of internet jokes and memes about what exactly a “black job” entails.
“They’re taking jobs from blacks and they’re taking jobs from Hispanics 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, speaking of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border cross. He then repeated the reference at a campaign rally in Virginia on Friday, adding that Black Americans who have been employed “for a long time” are losing their jobs to immigrants.
Black political strategists, elected officials and organizational leaders quickly joined hundreds of social media users to post photos of themselves at their workplaces and joke about the relativizing and racist nature of the former president’s comments.
Among them was Democratic House Representative from the U.S. Virgin Islands Stacey Plaskett who posted a photo on X next to two women in her congressional office on Friday, the caption read: “Another day in Congress doing our ‘black jobs’.”
Malcolm Kenyatta, a black Democrat from Pennsylvania and deputy for Biden’s campaign, joked: “Have we ever discovered what a ‘Black job’ is? People ask me.”
And Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, also criticized Mr. Trump’s comments: write on X that Black Americans “are not limited to one #BlackJob.”
Republicans, seeking to capitalize on President Biden’s slumping support among black voters, have made the immigration issue a cornerstone of their appeals to the bloc, whose rise could decide the November election. Mr. Trump has said that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and has repeatedly claimed that migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border 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 Mr. Trump claims that immigrant workers are taking jobs from American citizens, the country’s population of foreign-born workers is is not large enough to compensate for 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 battle over responses to Trump’s comments, saying Black voters “dragged Trump all night long over 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 this November.”
