You might think that the person launching a group called Black America for Immigration Reform is a person of color. But you’d be wrong. It’s William W. Chip, a white man who served in Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.
According to Politico, Chip is the only agent named on the registration form for the group that was registered last week, and his home appears to be listed as the registration address. During the Trump administration, Chip served as senior counselor at Homeland Security.
Chip told Politico that he started the group on behalf of two Black board members at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, T. Willard Fair and Frank Morris, and said that he himself will not sit on the board. The group will elevate research that finds immigration harms U.S.-born workers, he said.
According to Fair, the group was Chip’s idea. “Chip came up with the idea that we ought to begin to react again based on what’s going on at the southern border, and how it was going to impact us going forward. So he said, ‘let’s organize a group,’” Fair told Politico.
Chip elaborated on the reasoning behind the group in a Politico interview. “Anytime you have research that suggests you should reduce immigration, you’re immediately attacked by the mainstream media and the left and all the politically correct people — that oh, you’re just a bunch of white racists who want to keep America white,” he said. “And so the feeling was, if we had a legitimate, African American organization, whose board consisted of prominent African Americans, they might get more credibility.”
The group’s goals will be to advocate for harsher immigration restrictions, including on legal immigration, and increased vetting of workers to ensure they are eligible to work in the U.S. using e-Verify.
Chip also hinted to Politico that Black men who have a hard time finding employment “leave their wives” because they can’t find a job. “And there’s a lot of good research out there about that, but it’s not really getting the attention it needs in part because anytime you come out and suggest to limit immigration, the first thing the woke left does is accuse you of being a white nationalist,” Chip told the outlet.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report released earlier this summer, “Immigrants support the U.S. economy and its workforce by filling unmet labor market needs” and by starting businesses, immigrants “create jobs that generate employment for other U.S. residents, including U.S.-born citizens.” The foundation also wrote in the report that increasing “job opportunities for immigrants that fully utilize their skills could not only improve the health and well-being of immigrants but also support the economy by helping to address the country’s unmet labor market needs.”
Chip apparently views immigration as a zero sum game. In January 2021, he wrote on the Center for Immigration Studies blog, “When I moved my family to Washington, D.C., in 1979, most ‘nannies’ and housekeepers were Black. Within a decade, nearly all had been replaced by mostly-illegal Latina immigrants,” Chip wrote. He later added, “For the record, my wife is Hispanic.”