Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it's the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.

According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, in Charlotte, N.C., the unemployment rate for African-Americans is 19.2 percent. If you add in people who have given up looking for jobs, that number exceeds 20 percent, which, according to economists Algernon Austin and William Darity, has effectively mired blacks in a depression.

The recession has compounded a decades-long problem for black workers, who began the downturn facing a far higher jobless rate than the general population and have fared worse since.
< Now experts are worried that many blacks will remain in crisis even as the economy begins to recover, largely because the recession has eliminated so many working-class jobs in sectors like manufacturing and retail that are likely to come back slowly, if at all.

"Though blacks have long worried that the country’s growing foreign-born population, especially its swelling rolls of illegal immigrants, harmed their economic prospects, they have also followed their political leadership in backing liberal immigration policies. Now, however, as new waves of immigration inundate historically African-American neighborhoods, black opinion is hardening against the influx..."

"Tancredo said he gets 'insulted' every time he hears that illegal immigrants are working jobs American citizens won't take. 'I've done those jobs, you've done those jobs, our kids have done those jobs,' he said."

"Among students at 28 top U.S. universities, the representation of black students of first- and second-generation immigrant origin (27 percent) was about twice their representation in the national population of blacks their age (13 percent). Within the Ivy League, immigrant-origin students made up 41 percent of black freshmen..."

"Black American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, two Harvard University professors, have said that white educators are skirting long-held missions to resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans by enrolling immigrants who look like them..."

"For the first time since significant numbers of Latinos began arriving in Stillmore in the late 1990s, the plant's processing lines were made up predominantly of African-Americans..."

"Last year's discussion of immigration rights borrowed generously from the civil rights movement, but it had little space for a black position on immigration..."

"'This issue is not new; this preference for immigrant workers over native African-American workers is historical,' said Frank Morris, a former associate dean at the University of Maryland, College Park. Morris was also president of the Tacoma branch of the NAACP during the 1960s..."

"The civil rights which each black family earned generation by generation, struggling as citizens under threat of lynching, under threat of fire bombings, under threat of murder... but as citizens is being compared to illegal aliens who want "civil rights" that are not only not earned but they aren't warranted without citizenship..."

Results from the George Mason University Survey of Virginia Residents released on June 8, 2007:

Results from the California Field Poll released on April 11, 2006:

• 66% would support building a wall along major sections of the border between the U.S. and Mexico to stop illegal immigrants from entering the U.S.
• 59% would impose stiff penalties on employers and individuals who hire illegal immigrants.
• 54% would require undocumented workers who have lived in the U.S. for more than two years, but less than five years, to briefly leave the country and report to an American port of entry where they would be classified as temporary workers.
• Only 28% would allow illegal immigrants to obtain a driver’s license in California.
• 56% considered immigration a major issue in that year's (2006) upcoming gubernatorial elections.