Several studies have shown that the large influx of immigrants in the last 20 years has significantly expanded the nation's labor pool, allowing employers to depress the wages of the least-skilled and least-educated workers.
At the forum Sunday, many blacks said they bore no ill will toward immigrants in general but were alarmed by their seeming impact on their lives.
When Sean Jourdan, a 33-year-old African American born in Los Angeles, began work as a satellite TV installer in 1995, he said, most of his colleagues were black and all made more than $1,200 a week. That was enough, he said, to comfortably support a family.
Today, he said, only two of 75 workers at his firm are black -- the rest are Latino -- and wages have plunged. Desperate for supplemental income, Jourdan said, he recently bought a hot dog cart.
"I don't hate Hispanics," he said, "but I shouldn't have to compete like this when my people fought and died for this country. This is my birthright: to work, not to beg, for a living wage. They tell you to go to school and follow the laws of the land and you'll rise up. I've done that, but I'm being undermined."
As he listened to Jourdan's laments, Juan Santos, a self-described Chicano activist and writer, said he was sympathetic. But he said the problem was not Latinos, it was the nation's "capitalist class" that had shipped good jobs overseas, imported cheap labor and was now trying to pit workers against each other.
"It's the system that's at fault, not Mexicans," Santos said.
Hayes said his new group plans to organize a protest march through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall on May 21, invite gang members to join border patrols to stop illegal immigration and visit African American elected officials to demand to know how they plan to address the issue.
He added that he has written to Pope Benedict XVI, asking him to "rein in" Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, who has actively advocated for legalizing illegal immigrants and other reform measures.
Hayes is also an advocate for the homeless and helped to found Dome Village, a downtown experiment in alternative housing.
The forum drew an eclectic crowd that included African American members of the Minuteman Project, which sends private citizens on border patrols to stop illegal immigration; a Latino carrying a sign saying that America was actually Mexican territory; and one man wearing a Malcolm X cap and a "Bush-Cheney" political button.
When Hayes and others praised the Minutemen as patriotic Americans, other blacks screamed back that they were similar to the vigilantes who hunted down escaped slaves.
"Shame on you!" yelled Betty Jones, a Los Angeles resident.
But as the debates raged on, at least one person seemed pleased. Surveying the crowd, Santos, the Chicano activist, smiled and said:
"This debate is beautiful. These people are honestly trying to sort through all of these conflicts and contradictions."
