For South Carolina’s Black communities, immigration issues blur party lines

Republicans claim that their election year rhetoric about immigration has a new audience in the Black community. North Charleston’s newfound racial complexity tests that claim.

The working-class city of about 120,000 is one of the most strongly Democratic in South Carolina, more so than even its larger, storied neighbor to its south. It has also long been split almost evenly between Black and white residents. Immigration has been adding a third dimension to what was a two-way relationship.

In the “neck” of the barbell-shaped city, between the primarily white northern neighborhoods and the primarily Black southern neighborhoods are stretches where the shops advertise in Spanish and almost all the children getting off the school bus are Latino.

About 2.5% of North Charlestonians identified as Hispanic in the 1990 Census. That rose to 4% in 2000, 10% in 2010 and on paper, about 12% today, with 8% “other.” But the current census figures are questionable, said Enrique “Henry” Grace, CFO of the Charleston Hispanic Association. “Forget about it. Because Hispanics don’t do the census. Whatever the census says, double it.”

Immigration can be a tough topic to discuss in South Carolina’s Black community, which isn’t keen on offering white conservatives who regularly attack cities as “crime-infested” yet another reason to snipe at North Charleston, especially in an election year when immigration rhetoric on the right has become increasingly toxic.

But it doesn’t mean they aren’t asking more from Democratic leaders. In early June, Joe Biden announced changes to border policy, significantly curtailing asylum claims in a bid for bold executive action on a campaign issue.

The US president’s border order came with political pressure mounting on the president and Congress to resolve negotiations on a bill to change America’s immigration policies and stem undocumented migration. Some of that political pressure comes from big-city leaders like the mayors of New York and Chicago, after border state governors began shipping migrants to them last year, straining the social services infrastructure.

But the border action has an audience among Democrats in South Carolina, too.

***

Biden was serving red meat to Democratic party loyalists at a January campaign speech in Columbia, South Carolina, talking about his appointment of Black judges and lowering Black unemployment rates, when he threw them one nugget of red state steak. He complained that Republicans in Congress were thwarting legislation on the border – despite getting almost everything they wanted in the bill – at the bidding of Donald Trump in order to preserve it for him as a political issue.

“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said, to applause.

As attendees awaited the president before the speech, Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a Democrat, expressed sympathy to this idea. “I would expect the president, if he’s elected a second time, to close the border,” Butler said.

The population of both the city and county of Orangeburg, about 45 minutes north of North Charleston, is mostly Black, poor, rural and Democratic. Biden won 70% of Orangeburg in the 2020 primary – his best showing statewide – and two-thirds of votes in the November election.

Without a careful message, this time could be different. Shipping border crossers to big cities seemed like a publicity stunt, but it was one that worked, in Butler’s view, to highlight how problems at the border problems everywhere, including Democratic strongholds.

“I empathize with those mayors,” Butler said. “They have to deal with the expectations of migrants, and the security of them. You know we’re the land of the free and the brave, and we believe in taking care of all citizens. But those borders need to be secured to protect the citizens.”

Butler’s take on immigration isn’t uniformly held across the state.

Some Black political leaders in North Charleston beam about how immigration has changed their community. State representative JA Moore, a North Charleston Democrat, boasts of having the most diverse district in the state. “I’m proud of that,” he said. Moore pushes back, hard, against the suggestion that there’s tension between Blacks and Latinos about housing or jobs where he lives.

North Charleston presents a more nuanced test of the Black electorate’s reaction to immigration, because the growth of its immigrant community has come with booming economic growth and overall population increases. Even so, Moore admits that some could conflate something like the rapid increase in housing prices with the rapid increase in immigration.

“The housing market in general and in Charleston is higher than it was 10, 15 years ago,” Moore said. “And also the amount of Hispanics that are moving in has increased tremendously in the past 15 years. They see a Hispanic person move into their neighborhood, and they’re seeing the prices of the houses going up … People may be correlating the two.”

Donald Trump is counting on those kind of inferences.

Biden’s Republican challenger, known for his increasingly strident immigration rhetoric, responded to the border closure at a rally in the Las Vegas heat after Biden’s announcement, describing it as insufficient while arguing that the president is “waging all-out war” on Black and Latino workers. He falsely claimed that the wages of Black workers had fallen 6% since 2021.

The international manufacturers that have driven growth aren’t hiring undocumented labor, said Eduardo Curry, president of the North Charleston chapter of the Young Democrats of South Carolina. “A lot of jobs here in Charleston are skilled labor jobs. It’s not just … walk off the street and let me hire you.”

The problem, Curry said, is that too few Black workers in North Charleston have the training to take those jobs, even as those employers are yearning for more labor. Working class Black laborers instead compete with recent immigrants for jobs with less formal education required.

Tension between Blacks and Latinos in North Charleston has been relatively low, but may be rising because of job competition, said Ruby Wallace, a job recruiter at a staffing agency in North Charleston that serves warehouses and distribution centers – working-class employers. “Hispanics are working for whatever they can get at this point,” she said. “And they’re doing a lot of work.”

The North Charleston native said her staffing agency has lost 40% of its business year over year after some clients found it less expensive to hire undocumented labor through shady organizations.

The neighborhood around the staffing agency has become primarily immigrant, and the office, which has historically employed working class and poor Black, turns away undocumented applicants every day.

A cottage industry of employment of undocumented labor has emerged, undercutting legal operators by skirting federal E-Verify laws and omitting payments into workers compensation and unemployment taxes.

Wallace has been reporting the violations she sees to the US Department of Labor, to no avail. “I’m trying to figure out how is it possible for them to load people up and bring them, working here in South Carolina? Is it not illegal for them to do that?” she said.

***

Republican messaging aimed at Black voters mixes threats about job losses with invective about immigration, crime and cities.

Black voters are expected to ignore the racial undercurrent of attacks on cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia or most recently Milwaukee – a “horrible city” in Trump’s most recent tirade – while being receptive to the idea that undocumented people from central and south America make those cities more unsafe.

That hasn’t happened in North Charleston.

North Charleston began assessing the city’s racial disparity in arrests and victimization in 2020. A majority of North Charleston’s immigrants are Latino. According to a report released in 2021, Hispanic suspects represent about 7.5% of arrests, while Hispanic residents comprised 10% of the city’s population that year.

Violent crime increased during the pandemic in North Charleston, as it did in most cities with more than 100,000 residents. It has fallen since. But it is among the higher-crime cities in the state, with a murder rate about five times the national average.

Keeping the peace in North Charleston has meant navigating racial tension in a city struggling with poverty and crime. Immigration adds a new element to that challenge.

Reggie Burgess, 58, grew up in North Charleston and served on its police force for more than 30 years – five as its chief – before winning election as the city’s first Black mayor in 2023. He said he contends with a common trope: that undocumented immigrations bring with them an uptick in crime.

But that depiction of immigrants as criminals is false; they are measurably less likely to commit crimes than the native born. Burgess, who has witnessed the changes in his community firsthand, said he has had to meet with immigrants to discuss how they are too often victimized by other poor people who look like him.

Back when Burgess was still chief of police in 2017, he found himself conducting role playing exercises with Latino immigrants about identifying Black people, trying to build some trust with the community.

“We would actually turn them backwards, and we’d turn them around real quick and say: ‘Look at this person,’ and turn ‘em back around,” Burgess said. “I’d ask, can you give me a description of the person? We were trying to teach them to understand that a Black male was more than this afro. You’ve got to [describe] a shirt, or this lanyard.”

It became evident to Burgess 20 years ago that undocumented individuals were being targeted for robberies because they tended to work in cash trades, he said. That revelation led the city to start pushing the financial services industry to provide banking services, and was the start of relationship-building exercises between civic leaders and immigrants.

But the federal government doesn’t do enough to keep victims from being deported long enough to sustain prosecutions, he said, leaving undocumented individuals as easy targets for crime and exploitation.

“The U visa is supposedly supposed to help us lock in the witness for a period of time,” Burgess said, describing a victim witness visa program. “And Hispanics and Latinos would fill out the form, and I’m thinking: ‘Okay, we’re good.’ The next thing you know, they tell me the prime witness has to go back or got caught up at a traffic stop and is being deported.”

Underlying this issue is unstable housing and endemic poverty.

“There’s a lot of need in Charleston in the Hispanic community. Need for everything, housing, jobs, everything,” said Grace of the Charleston Hispanic Association.

The undocumented community in North Charleston tends to be concentrated in an area of the city with trailer parks and affordable housing. They are too often living in substandard or overcrowded conditions, said Annette Glover, who operates an immigrant-oriented community ministry in North Charleston.

North Charleston is part of a three-county metropolitan area of about 830,000 residents. Glover’s organization, Community Impact, assisted 86,387 people within that area last year, she said, with food, language training, housing assistance and other help. Most were immigrants. About 75-80% were undocumented, she said. With that has come a fear of appearing on the government’s radar, even while applying for help from nongovernmental organizations like hers, she said.

“We have found a way to actually get them to fill out applications, by allowing them to understand that we’re not going to be giving it to ICE or to anything like that,” she said.

Burgess said economic conditions and education are stress points. “I mean, some of these neighborhoods, the [adjusted median income] is $29,000. And then you can go a little further up, and AMI is probably is $101,000,” he said. “And without education, there’s no options. You have to settle for whatever you get.”

**

The gridlock in Washington DC on immigration has an impact on places like North Charleston.

Biden’s move to close the border to asylum seekers is a short-term approach to a long-term problem, Burgess said.

Without actual reform to the immigration system, undocumented immigrations will remain in the shadows.

“We have to step back and push aside these little personal vendettas and squabbles in these parties, and think as Americans,” Burgess said. “My people came here in chains 400 years ago. We’re free now, right? Why? We’re free because the country said enough is enough. And they fought brothers and sisters, fought each other, and they said: ‘Okay, everybody’s free.’ They could do that in 1865. They can do the same thing in 2024.”