Black Immigrants Can Play An Increasingly Important Role In Determining The Well-Being of Black Americans: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 6

One of the main purposes of these posts, sourced mostly from the three books whose covers are shown on the posts, is to help build a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of race in America today.  I also hope that many readers will find the posts to be less polarizing than so much of what we see on the subject from the media and politicians, which often is intended to rile us up and drive us further into our respective political corners. The goal of these posts, like most Lone Liberal Republican posts, is to work towards more sensible, pragmatic and consensus-oriented discussions about difficult issues that America faces today, like race.

Some more interesting and thought-provoking material from Immigration and The Remaking of Black America:

●       "Studies have shown that regardless of national origin, immigrants are more educated and have better health profiles than those who remain in their countries of origin. Thus, when they arrive in the United States, black immigrants already have certain advantages, at the aggregate level, over black Americans (and sometimes over white Americans). For example, in 2014, 63 percent of black Nigerian immigrants residing in the United States had at least a bachelor's degree, compared to an estimated 20 percent of black Americans and 36 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans. In Nigeria, however, only 7 percent of the population had earned a bachelor's degree."

●       “If we imagine a world where 1920's patterns of in-group marriage continued into the 2000's, eastern and southern European ethnic identity would have remained a salient feature of America's ethno-racial landscape. By the 1960's, however, intermarriage among Americans of European descent... had become the dominant trend.‎..Data from the 2014-2015 American Community Survey show that roughly thirty percent of married Asians in the United States have a white American partner." And about a third of Hispanics too. But fewer than twelve percent of intermarriage were between blacks and whites in 2015. This has led sociologists to argue that the historic racial stratification between whites and non-whites no longer holds. Instead they argue that the country's color line has shifted to a new binary between blacks and non-blacks… As this new color line is being drawn, however, black immigration is dramatically reconfiguring what it means to be black in America. Because of increased immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, as well as the relatively high birth rates among these groups, the percentage of black people who descend from American slaves has declined, albeit modestly, over the last three decades. Moreover, close to 20 percent of U.S.-born blacks under the age of eighteen have at least one foreign-born parent. These trends necessitate an academic consideration of whether the social and economic outcomes of black immigrants will mirror those of black Americans, thus blurring distinctions between the two groups in later generations, or whether black immigrants and their descendants will alter the trajectory of black social and economic outcomes." [emphasis mine]

●       "If black immigrant women have a higher marriage rate‎ than black American women and researchers do not disaggregate the black population when calculating marriage disparities, immigration could conceal the extent of marriage decline among black Americans." [Note: Same with educational achievement like reading and math proficiency.]

●       "Immigrants, and particularly less educated immigrants, may have a more ‎favorable view of U.S. labor market opportunities than U.S. born individuals, and this could lead to higher labor force participation and employment rates… Even though a migrant may realize that a foreign job carries low status in the country where he or she immigrated to, he or she does not view herself or himself as a part of that society but as embedded within the status system of his home community, where hard currency remittances buy considerable social status. "Researchers attempting to understand labor market disparities between black Americans and black immigrants have often overlooked this factor." For this reason black immigrants value labor market opportunities in the United States differently than American blacks.”

●       “Since 2000, black immigrants from Africa have accounted for more than fifty percent of the growth in black immigrants to the United States.”

●       "When [a researcher] asked Jamaican immigrants about racial tension in New York, most referenced tensions between Jamaican immigrants (and other West Indians) and black Americans, rather than tension with white Americans."

●       “Hamilton also points out a less appreciated aspect of racial disparities in labor market outcomes, which is gender. " Black immigrant women from all focal countries except the Dominican Republic surpass both black American female movers and white American women in terms of earnings.”

●       "Between 1980 and 2008, the incarceration rate for black men with less than a high school education had increased from 10.6 percent to 37.2 percent, a two hundred and seventy two percent increase over the twenty eight year period. Among white men with less than a high school education, the incarceration rate had increased from 2.4 percent to 12 percent, a four hundred percent increase over the same time. So while the increase in the incarceration rate was actually greater for whites, the percentage of incarcerated individuals was markedly greater for blacks."

●       “‎Black immigrants accounted for more than twenty percent of the growth in the black population in the first fourteen years of the twenty first century… As the black immigrant population grows, these new arrivals will play an increasingly important role in determining the well-being of the U.S. black population… Immigration could drive many of the changes in social well-being among blacks in the United States."

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If you find the subject matter in these The Mainstreaming of Minorities posts interesting, check out this link to the late Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Disuniting of America, foreshadowing the difficult place identity politics would lead us. (I used to get scolded for suggesting people read it.) All twelve of the posts can be found in the “For Those With More Academic Interests” section on the Lone Liberal Republican website.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing, and be well.