African immigrants

Significance:Many early African immigrants came to the United States as students during the early 1920s. By the 1990s, many were coming as refugees seeking a better life. Their physical resemblance to African Americans sometimes caused confusion, so they distinguished themselves from the descendants of slaves by retaining their native speech accents and many of their native customs and costumes. They typically have assimilated quickly into American lifestyles, establishing themselves in careers and professions that have provided comfortable living, stability, and social respectability.

During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, many thousands of Africans were forcibly brought to what is now the United States. Since the early twentieth century, it appears that more Africans have immigrated voluntarily than all those who had been brought earlier as slaves. Many have come as students to attend American schools. Others have been refugees fleeing repressive regimes, persecution, natural disasters, and harsh economic conditions in their home countries.

African immigration intensified after World War II, and an even more significant flow began during the 1970s, after the American civil rights movement improved conditions in America for people of color. Substantial numbers of refugees came from Ethiopia and Somalia, northeast African nations that were embroiled in civil wars and beset by drought and famine. Some 80,000 Africans entered the United States legally during the 1970s. During the 1980s, that number grew to about 176,000. It is probable that these numbers do not fully reflect the many undocumented immigrants who also entered the country in those years.

During the 1990s, the number of sub-Saharan immigrants tripled. Africans constituted only about 2 percent of all documented immigrants in 1991, but by 2000 their numbers had increased to about 5 percent. At the start of the twenty-first century, the US Census Bureau reported that nearly 1 million African immigrants were living in the country, 50 percent of whom arrived and settled between 1990 and 2000. Only about 18 percent came before 1980; 26 percent came between 1980 and 1989. In 2001, 31 percent of African immigrants came from Sudan, which was engulfed in a devastating civil war. Food, housing, and health care shortages plus drastic curtailment of civilian rights caused a debilitating struggle between that nation’s dominant north and its rebellious south.

By 2022, approximately 2.1 million African immigrants were living in the United States. Of these immigrants who relocated to the US between 2000 and 2019, around 35 percent were from West African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Mali. Twenty-six percent came from such eastern and northeastern African countries as Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Somalia. Fewer than 3 percent were from such equatorial African countries as Cameroon, Chad, Congo, and Gabon.

Locales Favored for Settlement

A high proportion of Africans who have immigrated to the United States have come from urban backgrounds and have already been accustomed to Western ways. Many speak English well when they arrive and are, for the most part, from families headed by married parents. These attributes have made it easier for immigrants to adapt to life in the United States, and a high proportion of them, have settled in large cities. About half reside in New York City, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. Nigerians and Ghanaians in particular have favored New York City. Immigrants from Somalia and the Sudan have differed by tending to settle in the Midwest.

African immigrant enclaves have churches and mosques that reflect their traditional religious rituals and customs. Their businesses are African-themed, especially in such cities as New York, Chicago, Houston, Washington, DC, and other cities with large numbers of immigrants. Immigrants who have attained measures of stability and economic success have generally shared their prosperity with their families in Africa. During the early twenty-first century, African immigrants remitted to their relatives more than one billion dollars annually. In some countries, most notably the Sudan, these remittances have made important contributions to the balance of trade.

Education

US Census data from 2018 indicate that black African immigrants have the most education of any population group in the United States. Indeed, they even have higher levels of academic achievement than Asian Americans. They were more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group. About 48.9 percent of Africans who have immigrated since the late twentieth century have college degrees. According to the 2008–2012 American Community Survey, 41 percent of the African-born population in the United States had a bachelor's degree or higher for the time period surveyed, compared to 27.6 of the overall US foreign-born population.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Africans who came to the United States as students made up only 13 percent of the total black population of the United States. However, that group accounted for 27 percent of all black students in twenty-eight top American universities. These figures are even more impressive in the elite Ivy League universities. Only 6.7 percent of all Ivy League students were from immigrant families, but 40 percent of all the universities’ black students were Africans.

By 2019, 42 percent of the foreign-born Black population in the US, or 2 million people, were from African countries. Primarily, Nigeria and Ethiopia supplied these immigrants, with 390,000 and 260,000 immigrants, respectively. More than half of the foreign-born African population held citizenship. Immigrants from Africa entered the country in a variety of ways. Concerning immigrants from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, half came to the US as refugee or asylum seekers, more than 24 percent of whom were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Around 12 percent of African immigrants entered the US through the diversity visa program, but the most popular way to enter was family sponsorship, which occurred most often among Nigerian immigrants.

Bibliography

Arthur, John A. The African Diaspora in the United States and Europe: The Ghanaian Experience. Routledge, 2017.

D’Alisera, JoAnn. An Imagined Geography: Sierra Leonean Muslims in America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013.

Gambino, Christine P., et al. “The Foreign-Born Population from Africa: 2008–2012.” American Community Survey Briefs, ACSBR/12-16, United States Census Bureau, Oct. 2014, www.census.gov/library/publications/2014/acs/acsbr12-16.html. Accessed 15 Mar. 2023.

Koser, Khalid, ed. New African Diasporas. Routledge, 2003.

Ndubuike, Darlington. The Struggles, Challenges, and Triumphs of the African Immigrants in America. Edwin Mellen P, 2002.

Olupona, Jacob K., and Regina Gemignani, eds. African Immigrant Religions in America. New York UP, 2007.

Tamir, Christine, and Monica Anderson. "One-in-Ten Black People Living in the U.S. are Immigrants." Pew Research Center, 20 Jan. 2022, www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/the-caribbean-is-the-largest-origin-source-of-black-immigrants-but-fastest-growth-is-among-african-immigrants/. Accessed 17 Mar. 2023.