Iago, Immigration, and the Cannibalization of the American Family

“Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak”–Othello, Vii
It’s not the current fashion to acknowledge that the post-1965 wave of immigration has had lasting and deleterious effects on Black Americans, but John Wood, Jr. of Braver Angels goes there on The Darkhorse Podcast from July 13, 2020.
I live in Los Angeles, Southern California. Blacks used to dominate the agricultural sector, the service sectors in California, and I suspect in other parts of the country. With the great society program and the opening up of immigration policy, what they call ‘chain migration,’ right, you had many immigrants coming from Latin America in particular who came in and dominated the agricultural and the service sectors, thus pushing African Americans out. At the same period of time, you had manufacturing opportunities beginning to go overseas to places like China and elsewhere in the late 60’s, going into the 70’s. You had many working-class opportunities for African Americans beginning to contract. That’s point number one.
Wood describes several other phenomena that, combined with “the absence of economic opportunity,” created a “cluster of systemic forces” that he views as essential to understanding the current moment of unrest, protest, and reckoning in the American streets.