Jessi Snider

July 10, 2008

Never Entirely Unaffected

The topic of African Americans, their lives and experiences, is widely discussed, debated, dissected, and even dismissed.  However, the topic of African immigrants is rarely addressed and personally I knew little of their status prior to the research for this assignment.  What are the particulars of this group of immigrants and how do they fare in America?  Does their experience mirror that of other more traditional immigrant groups or are they, like New World Caribbean immigrants, caught somewhere between the immigrant/minority dichotomy?

            In 2002, there were approximately 1.0 million African immigrants living in the United States (Grieco).  This group makes up about 3 percent of the total foreign born population in the U.S.  Only 18 percent of these immigrants arrived prior to 1980, while 26 percent arrived between 1980 and 1989.  The rest, 56 percent, entered between 1990 and 2000, making the majority of these immigrants new arrivals.  What is particularly interesting and telling about these numbers is that more people have willing arrived from Africa since 1990, about 50,000 legal immigrants per year, than the total who were brought over as slaves prior to 1807 when the international slave trade was outlawed (Roberts 1).  Because they are immigrants from afar, it would seem that this group will have a different “social contract” with America than that of the African Americans who did not choose to come here, but who were bought and sold like so much chattel.  

            Surprisingly, unlike New World immigrants of similar racial make-up, African immigrants “have the highest educational attainment rates of any immigrant group in the United States with higher levels of completion than the stereotyped Asian American model minority” (Wikipedia).  In fact, African immigrants are more highly educated than every other native-born ethnic group, including white Americans, with almost half holding a college degree.  This rate is nearly four times the percentage of African Americans who have a college degree. While 78.9 percent of Asian immigrants report having a high school degree or higher, 86.4 percent of African immigrants age 25 and older have the same.   This contrasts with 61.8 percent of the total foreign-born population in America having a high school degree or higher.  These numbers would imply that African immigrants should receive “model minority” accolades for their astonishingly high educational attainments, though we know this not to be the case.  Because these facts go essentially unacknowledged, there must be something more at work.

            While African immigrants continue to arrive in great numbers, highly educated and motivated to take advantage of “the American Dream,” African immigrants in American high schools express frustration with their educational experiences here.  Questions lobbied at the immigrants regarding Africa’s status as a “jungle,” populated by “savages,” proved particularly exasperating to the new students, as did the general “lack of respect” and exceedingly “low expectations” (Traore 349).  Perceived automatically as violent, loud, disrespectful, unintelligent, and hyper-sexualized, the male African immigrants in particular felt judged by the same stereotypes that plague their African American counterparts.   Being both singled out for their immigrant status, and lumped together with another group based solely on the color code, these immigrants find themselves in a neither here nor there limbo of “otherness” with their accomplishments unacknowledged and their skin color overly emphasized.

            African immigrants, perhaps uniquely, are unduly burdened with negative stereotypes that do not afflict similarly educated immigrants of other ethnicities, and yet they continue to flow in, educated and ready to work professionally.  Perhaps it is the enduring color code which despite efforts to the contrary, never seems to be fully eradicated and continually rears its ugly head.  If education and financial success do not relieve these immigrants of the burden of their outsider status, what will?  Does this not challenge the very notion of “the American Dream?”  I feel as though I have more questions than answers with only nebulous understandings and deceptive half-truths to comfort my newfound discomfort with the experience and treatment of this specific group who plays by the rules as we claim they are set up.  Or perhaps I understand all too well what is at stake and having the blinders pulled back from my eyes is rightly a jarring and disillusioning experience no doubt.  No pain, no gain, right?  Perhaps I should ask an African immigrant. 

Works Cited

“African immigration to the United States.”  Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.  9 July 2008.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_United_States

Grieco, Elizabeth.  “The African Foreign Born in the United States.”  Migration Policy Institute.  September 2004.  9 July 2008.   http://www.migrationinformation.org/Usfocus/display.cfm?ID=250#9

Roberts, Sam.  “More Africans Enter U.S Than In Days of Slavery.”  The NewYork Times.  21 February 2005. 8 July 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/nyregion/21africa.html?pagewanted=3&hp

Traore, Rosemary.  “Colonialism Continued:  African Students in an Urban Highschool in Amerca.”  Journal of Black Studies 34.3 (2004):  348-369.