Trump repeated those remarks during his speech to close out the Republican National Convention.

“You know who’s being hurt the most by millions of people pouring into our country? The Black population and the Hispanic population,” he said.

Trump’s attempt to tie his hard-line position on illegal immigration to the employment prospects for African Americans appears to be an attempt to peel away Black votes from his Democratic opponent. But it does not seem to resonate with most Black voters interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

McCrary, a retired farmer living in Albany, said he is not concerned about immigrants taking jobs, nor has he seen an impact.

“That is the biggest false statement I have heard from him,” McCrary said of Trump. “There are plenty of jobs out here. If you want to work, you can work.”

Data shows Trump’s claims are misleading. The average unemployment rate for Black Americans was about 8% between 2016 and 2020. In June, the rate was 6.3% and hit a record-low of 5% in March 2023. (The previous low of 5.3% came in 2019 under Trump.)

The unemployment rate for Black workers is higher than for other racial groups, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but it’s not clear that is due to competition with Latino migrants rather than factors such as institutional racism and fewer educational opportunities when compared with white workers.

‘Dog whistle’

Joel Alvarado, a nonprofit executive in Atlanta, said Trump’s messaging also fails to acknowledge people who identify as Afro-Latino. In a 2020 column for the AJC, Alvarado wrote, “I am both — equally proud and equally present.”

“Being a product of both the Black and the Latino community, I try to serve as a natural bridge builder. I believe there’s a lot of solidarity within both groups. We realize that we need to be working together to benefit our collective communities,” Alvarado told the AJC in a recent interview. “It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.”

About 6 million people in the United States identified as Afro-Latino in a 2020 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Alvarado sees Trump’s messaging as an attempt to “divide and conquer, an age-old tactic” that has been used for generations.

“I hope that both Latinos and African Americans realize the nonsensical nature of that comment and also the racial undertones of that comment,” he said.

What matters to both Black and Latino communities is access to affordable health care, fresh food, employment opportunities, quality education and a clean environment, “like anybody else,” Alvarado said.

“I’m not blaming an immigrant for the wage gap between Blacks and whites. I’m not blaming immigrants because whites have a greater percentage of homeownership than Blacks,” he said. “These are issues that have existed prior to immigrants coming.”

While foreign-born workers have begun to make up a larger share of the U.S. labor force, they prop up — rather than hinder — the nation’s economy, an economist at Moody’s Analytics told CNBC. The jobs immigrants are taking would often otherwise go unfilled.

Alvarado said he took Trump’s “Black jobs” comment to refer to agricultural, land-based, labor-intensive jobs, hearkening back to the nation’s history of slavery and sharecropping, a fundamentally unequal system for Black farmers.

“Historically, that’s the narrative of Black people. It’s not Black people being doctors and lawyers and scientists and innovators and financiers,” he said. “It’s Black people working in the field.”

Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist, went further.

“I would argue that it’s a dog whistle,” she said. “This is Trump’s attempt to try to reach out to Black voters and say, ‘See, you agree with me more than you think.’ But the problem is that it actually underscores Trump’s reputation for divisiveness.”

His comments have the effect of pitting Black and Latino communities against each other, she said.

“Blacks tend to have a lot of solidarity with other groups, even if it’s not reciprocated,” said Gillespie, who is Black. “The idea that you’re going to tell Black people, ‘These groups are your competition’ and expect that there won’t be a lot of Black voters who won’t see that as racist … is shortsighted.”

However, Henry Childs, a member of the Georgia Black Republican Council who attended Trump’s campaign rally in Atlanta this past weekend, said the former president’s comment was “right on.”

“You walk by construction sites, you go into McDonald's, you look at hotels — Blacks used to have those jobs,” said Childs, a retired Air Force commander who lives in Warner Robins.

He said he knows friends and family members who “are still looking for jobs” after the stimulus payments from the COVID-19 pandemic “dried up.”

“Immigrants have taken janitorial positions,” Childs said. “Those used to be ours.”

Paris McQueen, a software developer from Atlanta who also attended Trump’s rally, said the former president’s comment was “problematic,” but he said he understood what Trump was trying to say.

But he’s not sold on reelecting the former president just yet.

“I want both nominees to work for my vote,” he said.

Janiyah Thomas, the Black media director for the Trump campaign, defended the former president’s record on reaching out to Black voters.

“He shows up, listens, and makes it clear that we’ll be better off with him as president, just like we were four years ago,” she said in a statement to the AJC. “Ultimately, President Trump’s economic policies offered more opportunities to build generational wealth for Black families.”

Trump “will continue to show up and listen to the issues facing our communities, as he has done in Atlanta, Harlem, and the Bronx,” she said.

‘Never took a job from me’

McCrary doesn’t own his farm in Fort Valley anymore, but he mentors young Black farmers and still works occasionally with the Fort Valley State University College of Agriculture’s Cooperative Extension Program.

He said the conversations are not about immigrants taking “Black jobs,” although he runs into a lot of immigrants who are working in farming and landscaping.

Instead, the farmers he deals with have larger concerns about keeping their land and remaining financially above water.

“Farming is a business and a complete risk,” said McCrary, who now spends most of his time on America’s highways, delivering large trailers. “We have opportunities to do well, but that has nothing to do with immigrants. They never took a job from me or anyone that I know, and I have been around for a long time.”