Immigrants, Black

THE FIRST GENERATION OF BLACK IMMIGRANTS

BLACK IMMIGRANTS TODAY

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EXPERIENCES

THE FUTURE FOR BLACK IMMIGRANTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The black population in the United States has always been diverse in terms of national origins. A sizeable influx of black immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa added to that diversity in the second half of the twentieth century. Significant differences in the factors that stimulated migration, characteristics of the migrants, and the contexts they encountered make it possible to speak of two generations of black immigrants: the pre–World War II wave that arrived primarily between 1900 and 1930, and the post-1965 wave that swelled after the Hart-Celler Act (Immigration Reform Act of 1965) and other immigration-policy changes in the United States and Europe.

THE FIRST GENERATION OF BLACK IMMIGRANTS

Although the number of black immigrants historically has been quite small, their presence in the United States dates back to the turn of the last century. According to Ira A. Reid, at a time when U.S. immigration was at its peak (between 1880 and 1930), foreign-born blacks comprised only 1 percent of the total black population (Reid 1939). By the end of this era of mass migration, nearly 28 million immigrants had entered the United States; of that number approximately 100,000 persons were socially defined as “Negro immigrants.”

The first generation of black immigrants came primarily from the Caribbean region, Canada, and the Cape Verde Islands (a Portuguese colony off the west coast of Africa). The forces that prompted and sustained the migrant flows were fundamentally political and economic. In the British or anglophone Caribbean, oppressive colonial policies, economic distress, and natural disasters, together with opportunities abroad, occasioned mass migration to the Panama Canal zone, to sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and most notably to the industrializing United States. Similarly, Cape Verdeans fleeing drought, famine, and a lack of rewarding employment migrated to southeastern New England in search of lucrative, short-term employment.

The immigrants were mostly males in their wage-earning years; over 36 percent were between the ages of sixteen and thirty-seven years old; and the majority was not married. Many had been skilled artisans, bankers, merchants, colonial civil servants, and professional persons in their countries of origin. Because immigrant laws selected for literacy, more than 98 percent were literate when they arrived and, with the exception of less than 2 percent, they spoke English. Although the migrants represented a select segment of their home societies, in general they were future male industrial workers and female domestic servants.

These foreign-born blacks tended to settle in urban areas—especially New York, Miami, and Boston, which served as primary ports of entry. Cambridge and New Bedford, Massachusetts, Tampa, and Detroit also had sizeable black immigrant populations. Cigar manufacturing in Florida pulled migrants to Tampa; and black immigrants found work fishing, whaling, and, later, in the cranberry industry in New Bedford. Where certain groups settled had as much to do with the economic opportunities there as how they were located or perceived in the social hierarchies of each city or region. Notably, with the exception of Florida, few black immigrants settled in the U.S. South.

For the black immigrants who arrived at the turn of the last century, their hyperracialization as blacks had the most profound impact on their experiences. For the most part, distinctions of color, language, education, economic status, religious practice, and nationality mattered little in a society with a racial hierarchy held together by an ideology of biological inferiority. Whether or not they lived their lives as Haitians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, West Indians, or Africans, what the historian F. James Davis calls “the one-drop rule” of racial classification consigned black people of all classes to the bottom of the social ladder and was the basis for their exclusion from economic and educational opportunities (Davis 1991). Not only did they suffer from the same rigid segregation and blanket discrimination as native-born black Americans, in addition, they were rarely considered as part of the British or Portuguese immigrant communities. In a seminal essay, Roy S. Bryce-Laporte argued that for black immigrants, incorporation into the larger African American community generated an additional layer of social marginality; they were invisible both as blacks and as immigrants (Bryce-Laporte 1972).

BLACK IMMIGRANTS TODAY

The visibility of black immigrants has dramatically increased since the 1970s. In the ten years following the Hart-Celler Act, the number of black immigrants exceeded the total from the previous seventy years. Black immigration continued to grow in volume after that. Demographer John Logan and his colleagues show that black immigrant groups are growing faster than well-established ethnic minorities such as Cubans and Koreans (Logan 2003).

Unlike the first generation of black immigrants, the post-1965 wave is much more diverse in terms of both country of origin and type. In addition to the 1,393,000 newcomers from the Caribbean (primarily Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago), in 2000 there were nearly 600,000 African immigrants living in the United States. (Notably, there is no consensus in the scholarship about how to count black immigrants. The U.S. Census and the Immigration and Naturalization Service report the foreign-born by place of birth. Because not all African immigrants are black—consider the case of Egyptians or South Africans—and a considerable number of Latin American immigrants—from Cuba or Puerto Rico, for instance—identify as black, all enumerations of the population of black immigrants are estimates. The estimates reported here are based on sample data from the U. S. Census Bureau for the foreign-born population born in all nations of the Caribbean except Cuba and Dominican Republic, eastern Africa, and western Africa.)

The end of World War II produced significant political changes in many African countries, and in some cases political instability, economic mismanagement, and civil unrest in the wake of independence triggered migration. The main sources of African immigration are Nigeria, Ghana, Cape Verde, and more recently, the Horn of Africa—including Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sudan.

According to John Arthur’s Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (2000), post-1965 migration created a brain drain from Africa— an exodus of the educated, the professional class, and civil servants. This perspective mirrors that of earlier scholars who argued that black immigrants were more successful than native-born blacks because migrants represent a select segment of the populations of their countries of origin (Reid 1939). Across racial groups, immigrants tend to be self-selected with respect to human capital characteristics, such as education and occupational status. However, because the immigration reforms facilitated family reunification, those with relatives or contacts abroad could more easily migrate despite having lower skills and levels of education. Further, civil war and famine in northeast Africa have added a large flow of political refugees and asylum seekers to the number of voluntary migrants who come to the United States for educational and economic opportunities. The diversity of languages spoken and reasons for migrating combine to further dilute the selectivity of the contemporary wave of foreign-born blacks.

The level of geographic dispersion among black immigrants today is unique. Destinations such as Miami, New York City, and Boston continue to attract large numbers, but the residential landscape of post-1965 foreign-born blacks is decidedly metropolitan; that is, immigrant ports have expanded beyond the central cities. Rather than settling exclusively in urban areas, black immigrants have also formed communities in suburban and rural areas. African immigrants are concentrated in the Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan areas.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EXPERIENCES

Comparison to African Americans has been a constant feature of the social scientific literature on black immigrants. Since the publication of Reid’s pioneering work in 1939, scholars have been most concerned with what the experiences of black immigrants tell us about race in the United States. One noteworthy debate concerns the relative importance of race and ethnicity in determining socioeconomic success.

As Table 1 summarizes, contemporary immigrant blacks seem to fare better than native-born blacks on a number of socioeconomic indicators (Logan 2003): They have higher education and income levels, and a substantially lower percentage are unemployed or below the poverty line. Analyses of U.S. Census data also reveal that in the metropolitan areas where they live in largest numbers, black immigrants tend to reside in neighborhoods with higher median incomes, higher education levels, and higher proportions of homeowners than do African Americans. Some researchers have used such indicators to argue that race and discrimination are no longer significant determinants of life chances.

Moreover, recent research shows that the representation of blacks with immigrant-origins at selective colleges and universities is roughly double their share in the population (Massey et al 2007). Whereas only 13 percent of all black Americans between the ages of 18–19 were either foreign-born or the children of migrants, sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues found that among the black college freshman entering selective institutions in 1999, 27 percent were first- or second-generation immigrants. Their research, along with previous work which suggests favoritism toward black immigrants by white employers, calls into question, not only the efficacy of affirmative action programs, but also whether black immigrants are the appropriate beneficiaries of such policies in

education and employment designed to ameliorate the past exclusion of native-born, African Americans.

However, beneath the apparent differences between the majority of blacks with historical origins in slavery and in the rural South and black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa is a shared experience of race-based discrimination. The relative success of foreign-born blacks is partly due to the size of the black immigrant population: Even with the current rate of growth, they comprise less than 1 percent of the total population of the United States and only 6 percent of the non-Hispanic black population. For this reason, it is important to note how black immigrants are doing relative to whites and other immigrants. Compared to Asian immigrants, for instance, foreign-born blacks have appreciably lower median household incomes ($42,000 compared to $62,500), higher rates of unemployment (6.5% and 5.8%, respectively), and a larger proportion living in poverty (15.9% compared to 12.7%). Moreover, black immigrants, like African Americans, are highly segregated from whites; and regardless of nativity, non-Hispanic blacks live in worse neighborhoods than do non-Hispanic whites. With respect to academic achievement on college campuses, black students of all backgrounds do not perform as well as whites with similar characteristics. So far, the empirical evidence suggests that institutional and societal processes have a differential effect on black immigrants, compared to native-born blacks, not that there are discernible cultural differences at work. As Mary Waters concluded in Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (1998), race still shapes everyday life for black immigrants and their offspring.

THE FUTURE FOR BLACK IMMIGRANTS

Black immigrant communities will continue to be part of the U.S. ethnic mosaic. Contemporary black immigrants encounter a U.S. context that is more diverse, with considerably more recognition of the diverse national origins of blacks than ever before. According to Philip Kasinitz (1992), the racial structure of the United States prevented cultural self-determination and self-representation among black immigrants for most of the twentieth century. Within the black community, attempts by black immigrants to distinguish themselves from the native-born were considered divisive and ethnocentric. Today, the larger numbers of black immigrants, the uninterrupted flow of newcomers, and the new U.S. context have created a space for the consolidation of distinct black ethnic communities, subjectivities, and social identities.

SEE ALSO Blackness; Caribbean, The; Discrimination, Racial; Immigrants to North America; Marginalization; Migration; Mobility; Mobility, Lateral; Model Minority; Race; Racism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arthur, John A. 2000. Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Bryce-Laporte, Roy S. 1972. Black Immigrants: The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality. Journal of Black Studies 3: 29–56.

Davis, F. James. 1991. Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Kasinitz, Philip. 1992. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Logan, John. 2003. America’s Newcomers. Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research. University at Albany, State University of New York. http://mumford.albany.edu/census/NewComersReport/NewComer01.htm.

Massey, Douglas, Margarita Mooney, Kimberly Torres, and Camille Z. Charles. 2007. Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States. American Journal of Education 113: 243–271.

Reid, Ira D. A. 1939. The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937. New York: Columbia University Press.

Waters, Mary C. 1998. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Regine O. Jackson