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The New Black Immigrants Since the end of the World War II, more black immigrants have entered the United States than during the slave era, when 450,000 black slaves were forced to migrate from their homes to America. Of course slaves were hardly immigrants with legal rights; neither did they arrive of their own volition. For eighty years after the Civil War, free blacks did migrate to the United States, but even adding their numbers to those of the slave era would leave the total well short of the numbers experienced during the last fifty years. According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Caribbean immigration to the United States increased steadily after 1970; more than 900,000 Caribbean immigrants, most of whom were black by American racial classification, arrived during the 1990s. Even some Spanish-speaking Dominicans and Cubans, both major categories of immigrants, were considered black. In 2001 Jamaica and Haiti were among the top sending nations. In that year Haiti was eighth on the list, with 27,120, and Jamaica was nineteenth, with 15,393. So many black immigrants went to New York City that it retained its position as the city with the nation’s largest foreign-born black population in 2000.1 Immigration from Africa also increased after 1970. The INS reported that during the last five years of the twentieth century, Africa was sending about 40,000 immigrants annually to America, and the number reached 50,209 in 2001. (See Table 5.) More than 400,000 Africans arrived in the 1990s, the highest figure since any decade after the Civil War.2 The figure was small compared with the numbers from the Caribbean, but it represented a large increase from the 1950s and 1960s. The combined totals of the new black immigrants now make up roughly 5 percent of the black population in the United States, considerably more than the less than 1 percent reported in 1940.3 The exact number of black immigrants from Africa is unknown. Some refugees fleeing African nations, such as Uganda in the 1970s, were Asians. 9 232 Until recently nonrefugee immigration from the continent was dominated by individuals from Egypt and other parts of northern Africa, most of whom the federal government called “white.” Among those leaving South Africa before the end of apartheid, whether entering as refugees or as regular immigrants, an estimated 70 percent were whites who could no longer tolerate apartheid or who saw little future in their native land. A number of these were highly educated and constituted a “brain drain.”4 One New York doctor, who left because he did not wish to see his children raised under apartheid, said, “The politics was embarrassing to me. At times I was ashamed to mention to people that I’d been a South African.”5 A few other whites left Zimbabwe when blacks took control of that country.6 After 1980 the vast majority of immigrants leaving from other African countries were black. Among the regular immigrants after 1970, black nations such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana contributed the largest number.7 The Urban Institute’s Jeffrey Passel believed that only half of the more than 360,000 Africans counted in the 1990 census were black.8 But other officials put this figure at 70 percent or even higher. The growth of immigration from the sub-Saharan region in the 1990s doubled the number of African-born individuals in the United States. In 1999 the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education estimated that “perhaps 70 to 75 percent” of the African immigrants to the United States were black as de- fined by U.S. standards.9 The most careful estimates, based on the 2000 census, are by John Logan, who estimates that the sub-Saharan African population in the United States is more than 537,534, of whom 80 percent were foreign born.10 The New Black Immigrants | 233 table 5 Immigration from Selected African Nations (1991–2001) Country of Birth 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Africa 36,179 27,086 27,783 26,712 42,456 52,889 47,791 40,660 36,700 44,731 53,948 Ethiopia 5,127 4,602 5,191 3,887 5,960 6,086 5,904 4,205 4,272 4,061 5,106 Ghana 3,330 1,867 1,604 1,458 3,152 6,606 5,105 4,458 3,714 4,344 4,031 Liberia...

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