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:
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas’ mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,—not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us—the Irish!”
—Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906)
“A good leg will fall, a straight back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow, but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon—or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,—
One old jug without a handle,—
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,”
—Edward Lear (1812–1888)
“Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar? Why should one class of women be able to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks? Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 10 (1919)