The median white household owns over 10 times as many assets as the median Black household — a gap that has actually widened since the civil rights victories of the 1960s.

There are all sorts of reasons for this staggering inequality — from segregation, redlining, loan discrimination and other systemically racist policies that historically shut many Black people out of homeownership and prevented them from building generational wealth, to mass incarceration and sentencing disparities that put a generation of disproportionately Black men behind bars for nonviolent crimes and made it nearly impossible for them to get decent jobs after their release.

But one of the biggest — yet most underexplored — culprits is America’s immigration policy. Throughout our nation’s history, employers have preferred to hire newly arrived foreigners, who will often work for rock-bottom wages, instead of Black workers....  

....As Roy Beck’s new book, “Back of the Hiring Line,” thoroughly documents, Black Americans enjoy good economic opportunities only in tight labor markets. That’s why, in the decades following the Civil War, Black leaders like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph all favored restricting immigration to help free enslaved people and their descendants....

....Politicians in both parties pay lip service to helping Black Americans. If they were truly sincere, they’d listen to generations of civil rights leaders who’ve all recognized that the best way to boost Black Americans’ fortunes is to ensure tight labor markets.