African Immigrants and The Black Middle Class
Sub-Saharan African immigrants to the United States tend to have higher income levels than African Americans due to their higher education levels. (Sub-Saharan Africans are distinguished from African Americans, who are the descendents of America's black slaves). In addition, African immigrants have the highest educational attainment rates of all American ethnic groups, with higher levels of completion than the stereotyped Asian American model minority. Like most Asian Americans, black Africans migrated to America in the last few decades after the Jim crow/African American Civil Rights Movement era ended. Prior to the mid-1970s, there were very few non-white immigrants because of immigration laws, banning non-whites; that is, up until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was an extension of, and made possible by way of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Despite this, U.S. immigration policies are still discriminatory insofar as favoring immigrant candidates that have professional skills and higher educational levels over the many immigrant candidates who do not. In addition to this, it was found in a study that non-Mexican immigrants who can't simply cross the border, but must be able to pay for transatlantic journey, usually come to the U.S. already educated with middle-class backgrounds.
In 1997, 24.6 percent of all adult white Americans and 13.3 percent of all black Americans held a bachelors degree, while 48.9 percent of African immigrants held a bachelor's degree. Though the U.S. Census Bureau counts white populations who emigrated from Africa in the same category as black Africans, it shows African immigrants were more than three times as likely to hold a bachelor's degree than native-born African Americans. Despite the high educational achievement of African immigrants, African immigrants still tend to have lower median household incomes compared to other immigrant groups. Many African immigrants hold strong ties to their home countries and send remittances to their relatives.
Read more about this topic: Black Middle Class
Famous quotes containing the words middle class, african, immigrants, black, middle and/or class:
“Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The admission of Oriental immigrants who cannot be amalgamated with our people has been made the subject either of prohibitory clauses in our treaties and statutes or of strict administrative regulations secured by diplomatic negotiations. I sincerely hope that we may continue to minimize the evils likely to arise from such immigration without unnecessary friction and by mutual concessions between self-respecting governments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“It’s not like I was out there running and not knowing what’s going on in the country. I knew what was going on, but I felt this is not something that is going to bog me down and not let me participate. The only way I was going to make a difference for myself or any other black person is to say the hurdles were there and do what I had to do.”
—Wyomia Tyus (b. 1945)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)