A front page story in today’s Washington Post on the initiative in the Charlotte, N.C., area to include immigration enforcement in it’s policing efforts. It looks like it’s starting to work; in the words of a local immigration lawyer (really!):

“They’re putting the pressure on these people. They’re scaring them. People say we can’t deport 10 million. But you don’t have to. If you deport enough of them, others will go back voluntarily because they don’t want to live in these conditions.”

The usual suspects are squealing, though very revealingly:

“It’s tense, very tense,” said Angeles Ortega-Moore, director of the Latin American Coalition in Charlotte. “It used to be everybody here loved the Latinos. They would say, ‘We like you more than the blacks.’ Now we’re like the Big Bad Wolf.”

Despite constant “people of color” blather, Hispanic chauvinst groups have eagerly played the old immigrant game of “we’re better than the blacks.” And the evidence of how this has harmed blacks is piling up. America’s premier immigration economist (and occasional NR contributor), George Borjas of Harvard, recently co-authored a paper documenting how immigration has helped reduce blacks’ wages and increased their incarceration rate (paper summary here, and a discussion of it by Sailer here).

Also, my center has released a paper by economists at Northeasterm showing that immigration has crowded native-born young people, especially blacks and Hispanics, out of the job market altogether.

Look, I understand why conservatives get irritated by the leftist whining of so many black “leaders,” and even much of the black public — but these are our people and we have a responsibility as their fellow countrymen to try to persuade them of the merits of our positions, not sabotage them to the benefit of foreigners.

As Booker T. Washington said in 1895:

“To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’”