BAIR was founded in 2023 by Board members Willard Fair and Frank Morris, Sr., Black American leaders whose dedication to the cause of reforming immigration policy to serve the interests of Black men and women is evidenced by their long service on the Board of Directors of the Center for Immigration Studies. 

While most American citizens are descended from ancestors who immigrated voluntarily from their home countries to the United States (or from Native Americans who had lived here for centuries before the country’s founding), Black Americans are very largely descended from Africans who were kidnapped from Africa to serve as slaves in the Americas.  Notwithstanding their 19th-century Emancipation and more recent legislation to eliminate segregation and discrimination, many still suffer from the effects of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, especially young Black men who are significantly less likely to graduate from high school or college than their White counterparts and who therefor rely disproportionately on relatively low-paying manual jobs.  Their difficulties in securing regular work with decent pay have led to unwed motherhood and fatherless children, which in turn has held back the community from earning its rightful place in American society. 

In 2008, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported to Congress that adult Black males were “disproportionately employed in the low-skilled labor market in likely competition with immigrants” and that the Commission had found “modest to significant” evidence of the adverse effects of such competition.  To find such evidence today, one need only walk the streets of our Nation’s Capital, where one will observe that local African-American men are able and willing to fill nearly all of the City’s working-class positions in the fire department, the police force, city transportation, and waste collection, while observing at the same time that most similar positions in the private sector, such as yard work, carpentry, house painting, etc., are filled by immigrant workers, who are primarily from Central America and are often working illegally. 

Not surprisingly, a 2021 CATO Institute Poll found that 61% of Blacks favored cutting legal immigration by more than half.  We do not blame the immigrant laborers for taking advantage of our country’s decision not to enforce its immigration laws.  We instead blame their employers and the members of Congress who have declined to enact meaningful, enforceable restrictions on the employment of illegal immigrant workers. 

BAIR aims to reverse that ugly course by impressing on the American public and our Congress the need to limit immigration of aliens who are likely to compete for work with Black Americans and to enact legislative and regulatory barriers to the employment of unlawfully present alien workers.