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:
“In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.”
—J.M. (John Millington)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“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)
“Belinda lived in a little white house,
With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse,
And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon,
And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“Such is the nature of crowds: either they are humble and servile or arrogant and dominating. They are incapable of making moderate use of freedom, which is the middle course, or of keeping it.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“Take away from the courts, if it could be taken away, the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, and it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needful remedy available to all men for the protection of their business interests against unlawful invasion.... The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)