In this latest wave of mass immigration, the black elite has cooperated in its own constituents’ dispossession by unflinchingly supporting open borders. I got a sense of the reason for this at an Urban League panel I spoke on last week, when one of the other panelists, Prof. Gerald Jaynes of Yale, responded to concerns over mass immigration from the audience by justifying it as a means to move the country’s politics dramatically to the left. (Are you listening, Karl?)

But that’s changing. Up to now, the few black immigration critics willing to go public have been civic-minded individuals, without much prominence and not really representing any organized constituency. But as a story in the Miami Herald points out, a new critic has come forward — T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, chairman of the Florida State Board of Education (appointed by his friend Jeb, with whom he started the state’s first charter school), and, for purposes of full disclosure, a member of my board.

There are a number of black conservative critics of immigration — Ward Connerly, Shelby Steele, increasingly even Tom Sowell — but unfortunately they’re anathematized by the black community at large. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is, at least for now. Mr. Fair, on the other hand, while not really a liberal, isn’t a conservative either, and has been working for 40-plus years in Miami’s Liberty City doing just the kind of thing we need more of — starting a charter school, developing privately-owned affordable housing with strict rules of behavior for occupants, etc. But he’s getting killed by unending mass immigration.

If he keeps speaking up he could mobilize the discontent among blacks that flares up on black talk radio all the time but doesn’t go anywhere beyond that because immigration restriction has come to be seen by them as a white, Republican issue. Once it becomes a black issue, we win — all of us.