This year marks a milestone in Black American history. It’s the 50th anniversary of U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan’s televised speech to the nation regarding the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

Widely considered one of the best American political speeches of the 20th century, it catapulted Jordan — a Houstonian, and the first Southern Black woman in Congress — to national prominence. It remains the most celebrated moment of her career.

But there’s another element of Jordan’s story that’s notoriously undercovered: her opposition to immigration policies that have failed Black Americans for centuries — and continue to hinder their ability to build wealth today.

With slavery abolished after the Civil War, Black Americans began accruing real wealth. After emancipation, the white-black wealth gap narrowed from 23-to-1 in 1870 to 11-to-1 in 1900. While still suffering from both de jure and de facto discrimination, Black Americans took on paying jobs, became business owners and even purchased land.

Then the Progressive Era’s immigration boom began in earnest. Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million immigrants arrived at U.S. shores — destabilizing labor markets and particularly hurting low-skilled Black workers.

Numerous Black civil rights and labor leaders, including A. Philip Randolph, endorsed efforts to slash immigration rates. Excessive immigration, Randolph explained,“over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living.”

Congress ultimately listened and passed the Immigration Act of 1924. By tightening the labor market, the law was arguably a factor in radically shrinking the earnings gap between Black and white men between 1940 and 1980.

It’s simple supply and demand, after all. When there are fewer workers available, to attract them, employers have to raise wages and provide better benefits.

The 1924 law certainly had flaws. It gave preference to prospective immigrants based on their country of origin, and strongly favored northern Europeans. Ultimately, the law’s discriminatory nature led Congress to repeal it in 1965.

But lawmakers threw out the baby with the bathwater. Instead of creating a nondiscriminatory immigration system that protected American workers from cheap foreign labor, the reforms of the 1960s encouraged mass migration — and Black Americans have been paying a steep price ever since.

As Harvard economist George Borjas has argued, low-skilled workers — including many Black Americans — are particularly disadvantaged by lax immigration policies, because immigrants compete with them directly for blue-collar jobs. Each “10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the Black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of Black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of Blacks by almost a full percentage point,” Borjas and his colleagues concluded.

Of course, Black Americans aren’t the only ones harmed. Journalist David Leonhardt recently chronicled how American workers of all races have seen their wages decline thanks to the renewed tide of immigration that began in the 1960s.

He echoes the forgotten perspective of Barbara Jordan.

Jordan chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, a bipartisan panel of experts tasked by President Bill Clinton with offering a suite of immigration reform recommendations. After dozens of hearings and extensive research, the commission recommended that the United States pare down immigration to 550,000 people per year and eliminate low-skilled immigration altogether. Clinton initially endorsed the commission’s recommendations, but Congress did not move forward with the reforms.

Since the Jordan Commission, too many policymakers have defended a system that allows in millions of predominantly low-skilled immigrants, both legal and illegal, who depress wages for Black Americans. And it’s not just liberal lawmakers who protect the status quo. In ruby-red West Virginia, for instance, the state House passed a bill that would have required most employers to use the free, accurate E-Verify system to ensure that jobs only go to citizens and legal immigrants. But it didn’t make it out of the state Senate.

Reducing immigration, just as Congress did a century ago, would give Black families a fair shot at the American dream.

Andre Barnes is HBCU Engagement director for NumbersUSA.