Africans fastest growing immigrant group in America

So says The Economist in an article entitled: ‘Building Afromerica.’

dadaab-refugee-camp-aid-d-007
Refugees at the UN camp (Dadaab) in Kenya where many US-bound refugees are processed.

This is an article meant to put your mind at ease by suggesting that a large percentage of the Africans arriving in America are well-educated and live in the suburbs when they get here, thus not adding to inner-city poverty.
We don’t believe that is the case for the refugee portion of the flow (so far!).
However, if Obama gets his way, more will be in suburban towns, see here (educated, or not! impoverished, or not!).
I’m posting this because it includes a statistic I was interested to see—the percentage of legal Africans arriving as refugees and those arriving via the Diversity Visa Lottery.
If you don’t know about the so-called ‘Green Card Lottery’ you need to learn about it!
The Economist:

Relatively few Africans are illegal immigrants (those who are have almost all overstayed their visas). Instead, they have particularly benefited from the Refugee Act of 1980, which brought more refugees to America, and the Immigration Act of 1990, which created special diversity visas, issued by lottery, for people from under-represented countries. According to analysis by the Pew Research Centre, 28% of legal African immigrants who arrived between 2000 and 2013 came as refugees; 19% of them arrived on diversity visas. For all legal immigrants, the equivalent figures were 13% and 4%.

We learned in the first year of writing this blog that one reason the refugee resettlement program shifted to include large numbers of Africans was revealed in a 2007 report:

According to Heidi Boas in her lengthy 2007 paper entitled, “The New Face of America’s Refugees: African Refugee Resettlement to the United States:”

….several of the individuals interviewed for this paper identified the Congressional Black Caucus as one of the most influential groups advocating over the past decade for increased African refugee resettlement to the United States.

Back to The Economist…..
So what legal programs admit the other 47% of Africans? I would like to know!
Then there is this….

African migrants stand out from American-born blacks. Indeed, on most measures, they have little in common but their colour.

And, that is why there are conflicts when Somalis especially are resettled by federal contractors into African-American neighborhoods naively assuming (we can only guess) that since they are the same color they should all just love each other!  Not!

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