Press Release: New Edition of Back of the Hiring Line Documents How Lower Immigration Lifted Black Workers, and All American Workers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 15, 2026

Roy Beck’s expanded history traces two centuries of immigration surges, employer bias, and the depression of Black wealth, and the four decades when tight labor markets built a middle-class nation

ARLINGTON, Va. — Supporters of high levels of immigration increasingly claim the moral high ground in the immigration debate. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), lead sponsor of the Dignity Act, has said repeatedly that if President Trump backed her bill, he could “be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery.” The second edition of Back of the Hiring Line, by NumbersUSA founder Roy Beck, answers that comparison with 200 years of little-known American history.

For most decades since 1820, the book documents, American employers used surpluses of foreign labor to avoid recruiting and advancing former slaves and their descendants on the nation’s job ladders. The effect, Beck argues, has been to steal Black wealth before it could be earned. The median Black household today holds net assets of roughly one-tenth those of the median White household.

The pattern broke when the supply of foreign labor fell. World War I cut it off in 1915, and northern industry turned south to recruit, launching the Great Migration. The 1924 immigration law kept the supply low for four decades.

“The moderating of annual immigration in the mid-1900s was the greatest federal action in U.S. history in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers,” Beck writes.

Beck grounds his argument in history. Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and Barbara Jordan all gave the same warning over nearly a century and a half: an oversupplied labor market hits hardest the workers with the least leverage. The quote on the front cover comes from Douglass, who complained in 1855 that “every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant.”

The findings reach well beyond Black America. In the four decades after 1924, the book documents, tight labor markets helped make the United States a middle-class country. Real incomes of White men rose two-and-a-half-fold between 1940 and 1980, and those of Black men rose four-fold. By the 1960s, Beck writes, sweatshops had virtually disappeared and Americans of all backgrounds had reached middle-class status. In 2024, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton publicly reversed his long-held view of immigration’s effects on low-skilled workers. What changed his mind was that same history.

“History is on our side,” said NumbersUSA CEO Anne Manetas. “When immigration levels came down, American workers of every background gained the leverage to build middle-class lives. This book gives people the examples they need to make the moral case for moderated immigration.”

Roughly one-third of the book is new in the second edition. The additions include eyewitness accounts, drawn from government investigations and newspapers, of what the Great Migration looked like on the ground in the South. The edition also covers Douglass’s five-decade struggle with immigration and labor questions in far more depth. It traces A. Philip Randolph’s evolution from a socialist champion of open international labor movement to one of the strongest voices for moderated immigration. A new introduction, nearly double the footnote sourcing, and photographs of historic Black leaders round out the new material.

The final section lays out a legislative blueprint built on the recommendations of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by civil rights icon Barbara Jordan, a Clinton appointee. The commission called for cutting annual green cards by 40 percent, reserving employment-based visas for higher-skilled workers, and creating the verification system that became E-Verify. Congress rejected the package in 1996. It authorized E-Verify but declined to require employers to use it, a choice four subsequent administrations left in place. Three decades later, mandatory E-Verify remains the unfinished piece of the Jordan blueprint.

Jerry Kammer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, called the book a “powerful indictment of our governmental and societal failure to protect fundamental national interests involving Black Americans.”

Key facts from the book

• In 1960, all but 12 percent of U.S.-born Black men without college were in the labor force. By 2024, 35 percent of those aged 18–64 were outside it altogether. (p. 13)
• Congress passed the 1924 immigration reduction by votes of 308–62 in the House and 69–9 in the Senate. (p. 127)
• Green cards averaged 53,000 a year in the 1930s and 252,000 in the 1950s, compared with about 1,040,000 a year from 2001 to 2020. (p. 243)
• Meatpacking paid an average of $37 an hour (in 2026 dollars) in 1977. After the industry replaced much of its American workforce with foreign labor, the wage fell below $20 by 1992. (p. 186)
• The Jordan Commission recommended an eventual ceiling of 550,000 green cards a year, 40 percent below the 912,000 issued in 1996. (pp. 242–243)
• Black and Hispanic Americans earn nearly 18 percent of computer science degrees but hold barely 5 percent of tech jobs, according to a Washington Post analysis cited in the book. (p. 321)
• In early 1996, 72 percent of African Americans told Roper pollsters they wanted annual immigration cut to 300,000 or less, near the level before the 1965 Act. (p. 238)

Back of the Hiring Line, Second Edition (414 pages), is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook. More information is at backofthehiringline.com, and the book can be ordered from bookstores and at Amazon.

Roy Beck and NumbersUSA staff are available for broadcast, podcast, and print interviews. Review copies and high-resolution cover art are available on request from Katelyn Moon, katelyn@keybridge.biz.

About NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation

NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation is a national nonprofit that researches and educates on the effects of federal immigration policy on American communities, workers, and the environment. Roy Beck founded the organization in 1996, after Barbara Jordan’s death, in large part to study and advance her commission’s findings.

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