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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 1 13 3 The Distribution and Socioeconomic Status of West Indians Living in the United States THOMAS D. BOSWELL AND TERRY-ANN JONES In many ways, migration has been a way of life in the West Indies. Like all other areas in the Western Hemisphere, virtually everybody living in the non-Hispanic islands of the Caribbean can trace their origins to someplace else in the world. Even the pre-Colombian Indians, including the Ciboney, Arawaks, and Caribs, came from places outside the Caribbean (West and Augelli, 1989). Thousands of Spanish citizens immigrated to the Caribbean during the 1500s. During the 1600s and 1700s, tens of thousands of Europeans moved to the Caribbean from Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, and they were joined by perhaps five million slaves who were forcibly brought from Africa. During the 1800s, the slave trade was gradually abolished and later the slaves were emancipated, although the timing of this varied among the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies (Ashdown, 1979). To replace the freed slaves, the British, French, and Dutch imported indentured workers from their other colonies outside the Caribbean. The British imported workers, mostly on fiveyear contracts, from what was then British colonial India (now India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh). The Dutch imported several hundred thousand workers from India and the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and the French also imported workers from India mainly to work in the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique , but also to work in French Guiana (Henke, 2001). Until the late 1800s most migration had been into the Caribbean islands, but this began to change by the late 1800s as more and more West Indians left their island origins in search of better jobs elsewhere outside the Caribbean. Now, the islands of the West Indies became areas of out-migration. Beginning in the late 1880s and continuing to the 1920s West Indians from Jamaica, Barbados , Trinidad, and some of the smaller islands in the eastern Caribbean were recruited to work as paid laborers in building the Panama Canal, the railroads in Central America, and the banana, sugar, and pineapple plantations along the Caribbean litoral of Central America. By 1900 West Indians were beginning to make their presence felt in New York City and Miami. During the period 1900 to 1920, between 10,000 and 12,000 Bahamians had moved to Miami to work in the construction industry and an estimated 44,000 Jamaicans moved to the United States between 1900 and 1914, mainly to New York City (Henke, 2001). There was a lull in the emigration of West Indians during the First and Second World Wars and the intervening Great Depression. After the Second World War, emigration resumed. However, most of this movement was directed toward the home countries of the former colonial islands in the West Indies, such as the United Kingdom (concentrating mainly in London and the cities of the industrial Midlands) from the former British colonies, to France (mainly Paris) from the former French Colonies, and to the Netherlands (especially Amsterdam) from the former Dutch colonies (Potter, Barker, Conway, and Klak, 2004). During the middle 1960s the direction of emigration would dramatically change, as the United Kingdom , United States, and Canada restructured their immigration laws. The British Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 brought about an abrupt reduction in the number of West Indians emigrating to Great Britain. In the same year, Canada changed its immigration law to allow more West Indians to enter that country. More signifi- 156 Thomas D. Boswell and Terry-Ann Jones cantly, in 1965, the United States radically changed its immigration policy from one that enforced geographic quotas by favoring European immigration to one that was based more on family reunification and employment qualifications. This new law made it much easier for West Indians to move to the United States. As a consequence , there was a major shift in the emigration streams from the English-speaking islands away from Great Britain toward the United States and (to a lesser extent) Canada. In this chapter, we concentrate on the immigration of West Indians who have moved to the United States, especially those who moved since 1965. By 2000 there were slightly more than two million West Indians living in the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003). About 1.6 million of them (79%) were foreign-born. In fact, when considered collectively , they represent the second largest immigrant...

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