African Immigrants in the United States: Implications for Affirmative Action

Affirmative action, also known as equal opportunity, is a federal agenda designed to counteract historic discrimination faced by ethnic minorities, women and other underrepresented groups. It is an outcome of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement and initially focused on improving opportunities for African Americans in employment and education.

African Americans refer to the people whose ancestors were involuntarily brought from West Africa to the United States by means of the historic Atlantic slave trade. They have made a lot of efforts to obtain the equal human rights in the United States. And they are different from the African immigrants, who immigrate legally to the United States from almost all regions in Africa. And many reports have showed that first- and second-generation black immigrants were more educated and economically successful than African Americans. 

In this paper, the author examined the extent to which the black immigrant success story was directly relevant to African immigrants from different countries of origin in the United States.

First, the author introduced some successful stories and findings of African immigrants. Then he collected data from the three census years (1980, 1990, and 2000) and weighted the data differently. Next, the authors analyzed the variation in socio-economic achievement and in language and citizenship acquisition, and racial and ethnic diversity. Finally, the theoretical implications of the findings on affirmative action were discussed.

And the findings revealed that African immigrants were represented in the entire continuum of the American class structure, and therefore, any representation of a uniform experience was not empirically defensible.

Besides, a more robust data is needed to achieve a more comprehensive articulation of the implications of the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity on educational achievement among black immigrants. And both historical and contextual variables that can address the different social and political contexts that informed emigration from Africa, and the context of reception in host communities are required.

Article by Abdi M. Kusow, from Iowa State University, Ames, USA.

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Image by Alicia Watkins, from Flickr-cc.