[size=15pt][center]African Immigrants Find Opportunity[/center][/size]

By David Crary

"You could be here 20 years, but if you don't start participating, you're not part of America. What excites me every day is that I could go protest without fear of deportation or being sent to prison. , I could lobby, jump up and down, start my own business, and nobody could question me. The country I was not even born in is allowing me to dream." -Abdulaziz Kamus, Ethiopian-born activist

"I feel bad about that racism but when I come here now, I didn't feel it at all. I would never think someone would discriminate against me," she said. "I don't have any bad feelings for black Americans, but I am not one of them. , I'm not a black American, I'm not a white American. I'm an Ethiopian." - Tigist Mengesha, Ethiopian Immigrant

The 2000 Census recorded 881,300 US. residents who were born in Africa. By 2005, the number had reached 1.25 million, according Brookings Institution researcher Jill Wilson. Since 1990, the African population has more than tripled in places as far-flung as Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis, where Africans now constitute more than 15 percent of the black population. The biggest magnets are New York City and greater Washington, including its Maryland and Virginia suburbs; Wilson estimates that the African-born population in each area has soared past 130,000.

They range from surgeons and scholars to illiterate refugees from some of the world's worst hellholes a dizzyingly varied stream of African immigrants to the United States. More than 1 million strong and growing, they are enlivening America's cities and altering how the nation confronts its racial identity.

Some nurture dreams of returning to Africa for good one day. But many are casting their lot permanently in America, trying to assimilate even as they and their children struggle to learn where they fit in a country where black-white relations are a perpetual work-in-progress.

"To white people, we are all black," said Wanjiru Kamau, a Kenyan-born community activist in Washington, D.C. "But as soon as you open your mouth to some African-Americans, they look at you and wonder why you are even here.

"Except for the skin, which is just a facade, there is very little in common between Africans and African-Americans. We need to sit down and listen to each other's story."

As director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation, Kamau deals with some of the most hard-off newcomers dispossessed refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and other war-ravaged countries. They have been arriving at a pace of roughly 20,000 a year. Many of those from rural areas have never before used modern appliances and, in some cases, can't read or write their native languages, let alone English, she said.

"I cry a lot when I see the people being settled here," Kamau said. "Some are very frustrated, because the culture is so different from what they know."

The flip side of the refugee influx is a wave of sophisticated professionals who also are making their way to the United States. Census data from 2000 shows 43 percent of Africans in the US. have college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Compared to African-Americans, the immigrants' average household income is higher and their jobless rate lower.

They include hardworking couples such as Tigist Mengesha and her husband, Girum Ethiopians trying to build their own version of the American dream in the mostly black suburb of Suitland, Md. Girum, 36, was granted asylum in the US. in 2002 because of political tensions in Ethiopia. Tigist joined him two years later, bringing their sons Biniyam and Fitsum, now 7 and 6.

The family had lived comfortably in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, with their own walled home and servants to look after the children while Girum worked as a bank manager and Tigist as an executive secretary.

In Washington, Girum had to resume his banking career at the bottom, as a teller, but has worked his way up to assistant manager and is pursuing a master's degree at a business college.

Tigist is a family counselor at a Head Start center, advising many Ethiopians as well as a few African-American parents. "In some ways, life is harder here," she said. "But we have hope we are adjusting ourselves to the new situation."

She notes that they can't afford hired help and scramble to raise their sons while working full-time. On the bright side, however, they recently bought a townhouse.

Tigist said her relations with African-Americans have mostly been amicable, though on occasion she has sensed ill-feelings. "Some people, they treat you as if you don't know anything," she said, "as if you're from the jungle."

Lack of knowledge can cut both ways. Tigist is gradually learning details of America's racial history, even watching the TV mini-series "Roots."

Democratic president candidate Barak Obama, son of a black Kenyan father and white American mother, has wrestled with similar issues. Some skeptics have doubted whether his background will appeal to black voters, and he recalled in his memoirs that he was rebuffed by national civil rights groups when he was younger.

Jacqueline Copeland-Carson, an African-American scholar with Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, is optimistic that African immigrants and African-Americans will outgrow any strains, which she blames partly on stereotypes.

"Some Africans view African-Americans as violent, lazy, intellectually inferior US. blacks are taught that the Africans are less civilized, not as capable," she said.

"As people get to know each other in churches and mosques and community associations, they're beginning to realize they've been taught lies about each other. They're starting to understand they share many things in common."

In the District of Columbia, as in some other cities, there has been occasional friction between recently arrived Africans and the entrenched, politically powerful black American community.

Some African-Americans bristled at a proposal subsequently withdrawn to officially nickname a bustling one-block stretch of 9th Street as "Little Ethiopia." More broadly, civic leaders say there is some resentment among working-class African-Americans who view the newcomers as threats to their jobs in such fields as health care, civil service and hotel work.

"Sometimes it's very overwhelming to the African-American community," said Abdulaziz Kamus, an Ethiopian-born activist who works on numerous immigrant issues. "They feel threatened that we are coming here and demanding jobs. If I was an African-American, I would feel the same thing."

In an overture to the newcomers, the city government formed an Office of African Affairs in 2006. But even this gesture ruffled some feathers, because not all black American leaders felt it was needed, and some Africans say they have been disappointed by a lack of dynamism in the office's first few years of operation.

Bobby Austin, a vice president at the University of the District of Columbia, has been one of a relative handful of prominent African-Americans in the city to delve deeply into the tensions and misunderstandings. He and Kamus have promoted townhall dialogues between members of the two communities; some sessions are to be shown on a local cable channel this summer. American blacks, Austin said, do not see themselves as immigrants and often do not comprehend the Africans' desire to come here.

"We are going to have to learn a new narrative," Austin said. "We will have to learn to work with them, and they will have to learn to work with us."

While African-Americans trace their presence in America back to the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern surge of Africans dates to the post-independence era of the 1960s and '70s. Persistent conflict and corrupt government in much of Africa prompted more to follow in subsequent years, and the surge increased in the 1990s due to the Diversity Visa Lottery, a federal program boosting immigration from countries that traditionally sent few people.

The largest groups of Africans in the US. are from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana, but the influx is diverse. The refugee program, for example, is accepting people from roughly two-dozen African countries each year; more than 200,000 African refugees have been taken in since 1980.

Some Americans, black and white, assume the Africans must share a common culture and outlook with one another, when in fact they may feel no deep bond with another ethnic group from their own country, let alone with Africans from distant corners of the continent. Immigrant leaders trying to encourage solidarity among Africans have found that task challenging.

There has been a wide range of cultural clashes some serious, some bemusing as the new Africans fan out across the country. Some polygamous families have managed to settle in the US., despite laws forbidding that. Women's rights activists and health officials have been on the lookout for cases of female circumcision illegal in the US. but a common practice in some African regions.

Wanjiru Kamau, the Kenyan activist, says many newly arrived Africans find American culture bewildering. She tells them not to look down, but into the eyes of a person they are speaking to; she has fielded complaints that African nurses, accustomed to the relative din of hospitals in their homelands, talk too loudly on the job in America.

"That's how they talk where they came from," Kamau said. "Sometimes we fail to realize where we are."

Nurses and doctors are among the tens of thousands of well-trained Africans who have settled in America contributing to concerns that a brain drain to Europe and the US. is depriving Africa of badly needed talent. Some of the expatriates say they are doing more good in the United States, where African immigrants earn enough to send back an estimated $3 billion a year to relatives in their homelands.

"The conditions at home often make it difficult to go back," said Nigerian native Ike Udogu, a professor at Appalachian State University who came to North Carolina 36 years ago.

"Here, there are great facilities," he said. "You simply want to do your work in a society where your life is not in danger."

Udogu has a thoroughly Americanized son who just finished college in Indiana. Likewise with Ghana-born Kukuwa Nuamah, 49, of Vienna, Va., a performer and instructor of African dance whose two daughters have completed college in Virginia.

"You can't hear one African accent from our children," Nuamah said. "They go back to Africa and get to know the culture there. When they are here, they feel fully American. They have both worlds."

In greater Washington, the Ethiopian and Nigerian communities are large enough so that immigrants could isolate themselves and minimize contact with American culture.

"For me, that's not healthy," said Abdulaziz Kamus, who has tried to encourage African taxi drivers and other immigrants to become politically engaged.

"You could be here 20 years, but if you don't start participating, you're not part of America," he said.

"What excites me every day is that I could go protest without fear of deportation or being sent to prison. I could lobby, jump up and down, start my own business, and nobody could question me. The country I was not even born in is allowing me to dream."

Associated Press Newswire

Comments?

akata vs akatalysis

[size=15pt]"What excites me every day is that I could go protest without fear of deportation or being sent to prison. I could lobby, jump up and down, start my own business, and nobody could question me. The country I was not even born in is allowing me to dream."[/size]

If you like dance kokoma from the white house to the twin cities , there's still no place like home.
You are still in a foreign land!
and if you don't go home as a grown man or woman you'll get there in a wooden box in the cargo compartment of United Airlines or Air France.

plus_Queen:

If you like dance kokoma from the white house to the twin cities , there's still no place like home.
You are still in a foreign land!
and if you don't go home as a grown man or woman you'll get there in a wooden box in the cargo compartment of United Airlines or Air France.

na true you talk. first generation immigrants still long for home.

plus_Queen:

If you like dance kokoma from the white house to the twin cities , there's still no place like home.
You are still in a foreign land!
and if you don't go home as a grown man or woman you'll get there in a wooden box in the cargo compartment of United Airlines or Air France.

I can somewhat agree with what your saying, but what is your opinion about the African refugees who have no other place to go? Our people (yes, I consider all Africans my people) are making strides in America, while at the same time sending over $3 Billion back home to relatives.

I myself am a student, and plan on living in America for at least six more years to achieve a doctrine degree in Architecture with an emphasis on Urban Planning. My dream is to return to Naijia, and establish my own Architecture firm there. I'm not going to deny I miss being home in Naija, but at the same time there are millions of opportunities to be made here in America, and the longer I stay, the more prepared I will be.

I don't understand how are Africans changing the landscape of cities in an around the world. I don't see how having a stall on a street corner in Harlem or working for Macdonalds in London can be seen as positive. What's happening to Africans especially in Europe, is that they're in places where the are not even wanted. That's why you'll here stories like "Africans killed in Ukraine"

It is highly moronic that an African would be made glad by the fact that he/she is contributing to the economy of New York whereas Lagos or Accra is turning into a rubbish bin. In the eyes of the British, White Americans etc, Africans will
forever remain as second class human beings.

.

Ignorance breeds hate,racism,tribalism,back-bitting,name it,it all boils down to stack inherent and perpetual ignorance and lack of self-belief.True knowledge is redeeming,understanding one self,helps one to understand the other.Try and understand the simple mechanism of your own body,and see how mechanical and machine like like humans are and know whether it is something to kill for unnecessarily or in anyway lack.

A house divided among itself is doom.even on a world scale,there can't be peace in the world unless there is love,equality,justice and respect for all.Every body wants something,life is relative.

@tpia

who said I'm speaking for whites. You're one of the persons that I'm talking about. You're probably exhausting the New Zealand social system. Go back home you slowpoke!!!!!!

mpele lyour first post made me laugh comic relief
home is where your heart is

Mpele:

@tpia

who said I'm speaking for whites. You're one of the persons that I'm talking about. You're probably exhausting the New Zealand social system. Go back home you slowpoke!!!!!!

Mpele, you forgot to tell her who is turning Hillbrow into a 'heap trash'. She does not know that the pimps and drug pushers that are roaming the streets of Hillbrow and Sunnyside are non either that the Nigerians. Probably her uncles or brothers.

Surely, There is no place like home. For those whose home is now the USA. Many of them seem to be doing well from their homes. Is it wrong for an African to make his new home his “home”? Like the poster before me, Home is where your heart is. If your heart is where you are right this minute, then you are home. No need to go on and on with this false idea that if you are African, the only home you can ever know is Africa and no other place will do. That belief is baseless.

.

.

.

tpia:


Could also be you and your Nigerian gigolos.

You should know those Nigerian pimps and drug pushers, shouldnt you, since you're well acquainted with the streetwalking trade.

I see you questioned your dad well well. Yes, he knows me BEST!! You should hear what he has to say about your momma!! Nasty stuffs!

hehehe, catfight. picks a sit

Everybody has a right to choose where he/she considers his/her home
So many of us living in Lagos are not true Orign of Lagos. A lot of people irrespective of their ethnicity claim Lagos as their Home. I'm happy for those who finally find peace in their new homes.

@tpia, Can you please ignore those distractions in human form behind the screens

I would rather go back home and live extremely comfortable, than go through trials of working a 9-5 here in North America.
For the Advantages of going back home far outweigh those of staying in this xenophobic environment, where winters leave half the population contemplating suicide. Happiness to me is an important criteria for evaluating where one builds his nest. Nigeria with all its wrongness still provides a sense of belonging for me!

Mpele:

I don't understand how are Africans changing the landscape of cities in an around the world. I don't see how having a stall on a street corner in Harlem or working for Macdonalds in London can be seen as positive. What's happening to Africans especially in Europe, is that they're in places where the are not even wanted. That's why you'll here stories like "Africans killed in Ukraine"

It is highly moronic that an African would be made glad by the fact that he/she is contributing to the economy of New York whereas Lagos or Accra is turning into a rubbish bin. In the eyes of the British, White Americans etc, Africans will
forever remain as second class human beings.

Did you even read the article, or do you just take every chance to degrade anything that has the word "African" inside of it?

abdurrazaq:

Everybody has a right to choose where he/she considers his/her home
So many of us living in Lagos are not true Orign of Lagos. A lot of people irrespective of their ethnicity claim Lagos as their Home. I'm happy for those who finally find peace in their new homes.

@tpia, Can you please ignore those distractions in human form behind the screens

Yep ure right!!! Her screen. She is so destructive!!

.

tpia:

honey, don't take it out on me just because the only Nigerians you know are those Hillbrow destroying pimps and drug addicts.  Your customers and suppliers, in other words.

If you clean up your act a bit, you may still get a chance to mix with some educated and respectable Nigerians. By cleaning up your act I mean get off the mean streets and quit your hooker job.


@ abdulrazzaq: these clowns always want to display their big mouths. No be only them get mouth jare. Their bad belle knows no bounds.

Like I said, your FATHER!!Send ur mom over and I can give her some lessons!

Kobojunkie:

Surely, There is no place like home. For those whose home is now the USA. Many of them seem to be doing well from their homes. Is it wrong for an African to make his new home his “home”? Like the poster before me, Home is where your heart is. If your heart is where you are right this minute, then you are home. No need to go on and on with this false idea that if you are African, the only home you can ever know is Africa and[b] no other place will do. That belief is baseless.[/b]

There is nothing 'baseless' about it - it may not be universally applicable to all people, but some people are genuinely not suited to living outside their homeland, both physiologically and mentally, the key is determining what is most suited for yourself and sticking to it without getting unduly influenced by others.

It is not a false idea that Africans are likely to be most happy in African, all things being equal.

Kobojunkie:

Surely, There is no place like home. For those whose home is now the USA. Many of them seem to be doing well from their homes. Is it wrong for an African to make his new home his “home”? Like the poster before me, Home is where your heart is. If your heart is where you are right this minute, then you are home. No need to go on and on with this false idea that if you are African, the only home you can ever know is Africa and no other place will do. That belief is baseless.

I wonder how folks SKIP the part of that statement in bold. AGAIN. . . . . IT IS BASELESS TO BELIEVE THAT ONCE YOU ARE AFRICAN, THE ONLY HOME YOU CAN KNOW IS AFRICA.

abdurrazaq:

Everybody has a right to choose where he/she considers his/her home
So many of us living in Lagos are not true Orign of Lagos. A lot of people irrespective of their ethnicity claim Lagos as their Home. I'm happy for those who finally find peace in their new homes.

Precisely!!

.

ROTFLMFAO!!!

[size=15pt][center]Nigerian Immigrants Not Your Average Cabbies[/center][/size]

Amy Jeffries
Published 08/01/2008 - 12:09 p.m. GMT

There is “nothing lower” than taxi driving in Nigeria, but in the United States it’s a springboard to greater things.

OAKLAND, Calif. – Sixteen years ago Dozie Ezeife drove a cab, now he drives a Mercedes, but not for a living.

For the first two and a half years after Ezeife immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area from Nigeria, he spent 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, behind the wheel of a taxi. In between the morning and evening rush hours, he would pull over by a station at the Bay Area’s subway system, put his feet up on the dashboard, and his nose in a law book.

Like actors who wait tables before getting a big break, many Nigerian immigrants in the Bay Area drive cabs on their way to earning the degrees and licenses they need for professional careers in law, medicine or business, according to community leaders.

The 2000 U.S. Census estimates there are more than 3,000 Nigerians in the Bay Area, though local Nigerians say the population is closer to 20,000. The government’s figures indicate that almost all Nigerians arrive with high school diplomas, and better than 60 percent have college degrees.

One long time cab driver, who has yet to reach his goal and asked not be identified, said that at any one time probably a quarter of Oakland’s cab drivers are from Nigeria. Ezeife, now 44, earned a law degree in Nigeria in 1985 and practiced for several years in Onitsha, a commercial center in Eastern Nigeria. He was able to pay his bills, but little more.

“That’s not what I went to school for, just to be living from day to day,” Ezeife said. “I was thinking just in terms of continuing to move up the social ladder, maybe get a bigger car, maybe build my own house, potentially get married some time.”

But in Nigeria, ambition and education failed to be enough to succeed.

“If you’re not well connected all that doesn’t necessarily translate to success,” Ezeife said. “I’ve always known that America is a place that if you really work hard you can make it.”

When Ezeife decided to head to the United States in 1990, he already had several friends living in Oakland.

His law school classmate, Donald Amamgbo, also 44, had moved to California a year earlier to intern at a law firm in Sacramento. He planned to complete an advanced degree in international law at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law. Amamgbo found he could sit for the bar in California without another degree, but when his internship ended, he needed a job to pay his bills while he studied for the exam. The firm he had been interning for didn’t have the resources to put Amamgbo on the payroll, and his attempts to find legal work elsewhere failed.

“I don’t know if race was a factor, but I know definitely being from Nigeria was a factor, because all my education up to that point was based on the Nigerian legal system,” Amamgbo said.

“So I made that decision that I wasn’t gonna waste time trying to find a home in a law firm while I was trying to pass the bar. At that point my focus was, pay your rent, put some food on the table, and study like hell.”

A childhood friend suggested Amamgbo join him in Oakland where he could easily make $100 a day driving a cab.

“I did the math, 30 days means three grand. My dreams to sit for the bar was gonna come true.”

Ezeife, who had been languishing in Canada doing odd jobs for nine months, also quickly saw the advantages, but he never would have considered driving a cab in Nigeria.

“The kind of people who do commercial driving back home are people who didn’t go to school. Other than somebody who is farming or a domestic servant, there’s nothing lower than that. It’s that low,” Ezeife said.

But here in the United States, Eseife said, driving a cab was simply a means to an end. When the men both passed the bar exam in 1993, they went into practice together. While they built a clientele, both continued to drive cabs.

In 1995, the pair won their first case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals where they argued on behalf of a minority business owner who the U.S. Army had wrongly denied a contract.

The following year Eziefe bought his current home in El Sobrante, an upscale incorporated area of Contra Cost County, where the average value of a condominium is estimated at $439,000. He is married and has three children. Amamgbo has a wife, two daughters and a house in the Oakland Hills, a prestigious part of Oakland.

Future cabbies may not be as lucky

Not all Nigerians reach their goals so quickly.

The man who taught Eziefe and Amamgbo how to drive taxis has been behind the wheel for nearly 20 years. The cabbie, who asked to remain anonymous because of the social stigma associated with driving a cab, said he’s watched many come and go from the occupation over the years.

He attributed his long transition to becoming a registered nurse to personal circumstances.

When he arrived, making money was more important than going to school because he wanted to help his younger siblings through college, start a family and buy property in Nigeria.

Moreover, as time has gone on, driving a cab has become less lucrative.

“When I started it was much, much, better,” the cabdriver said. “Because then there was no bus to San Francisco Airport; there were no airport shuttles. So there were a lot of long fares, so you work less, and you make more money.”

Now he has to hustle for a full 12-hour shift to earn the same $100. That leaves little time for study.

“If you really want to read, then you’re not gonna make money,” he said.

He scaled back his driving when he returned to school and now drives three days a week to allow time for his studies. He expects to graduate from nursing school and cab driving in 2008.

Mshale

bump!

[size=15pt][center]In America, Nigerians’ education pursuit is above rest[/center][/size]

By LESLIE CASIMIR
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Nigerian immigrants have the highest levels of education in this city and the nation, surpassing whites and Asians, according to Census data bolstered by an analysis of 13 annual Houston-area surveys conducted by Rice University.

Although they make up a tiny portion of the U.S. population, a whopping 17 percent of all Nigerians in this country held master’s degrees while 4 percent had a doctorate, according to the 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 37 percent had bachelor’s degrees.

To put those numbers in perspective, 8 percent of the white population in the U.S. had master’s degrees, according to the Census survey. And 1 percent held doctorates. About 19 percent of white residents had bachelor’s degrees. Asians come closer to the Nigerians with 12 percent holding master’s degrees and 3 percent having doctorates. …

Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University who conducts the annual Houston Area Survey, suspects the percentage of Nigerian immigrants with post-graduate degrees is higher than Census data shows.

Of all the Nigerian immigrants he reached in his random phone surveys 1994 through 2007 — 45 households total — Klineberg said 40 percent of the Nigerians said they had post-graduate degrees.

“These are higher levels of educational attainment than were found in any other … community,” Klineberg said.

There are more than 32,000 Nigerians in Houston, according to the latest Census data, a figure sociologists and Nigerian community leaders say is a gross undercount. They believe the number to be closer to 150,000.

There are plenty of worthy Nigerian-Americans, but when your countrymen have blanketed the world with faxes and emails for 15 years with accounts of embezzled funds just waiting to be smuggled out of Lagos, well, you do pay a price in credibility.

Consider that the Swiss made money off their reputation for honesty (if you put your money in a Swiss bank, they’ll let you have it back), while Nigerians have tried to make money off promoting the stereotype of Nigeria as so corrupt that there are piles of stolen money lying around ripe for the taking.

Skepticism aside, African immigrants to the U.S. are the cream of the crop, a big crop of 770 million people, much like Indian immigrants. A friend of mine from Cameroon came from a family in which eight of the nine children had earned advanced degrees from European or American universities. So, many of them are solid performers.

Also, as Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates have frequently complained, there’s a big demand from American universities for blacks for quota purposes, and so long as you look at least part African, the admissions committees don’t care whether your ancestors were slaves in America or whether your ancestors got rich selling slaves to the Europeans. Moreover, Africans tend to have less attitude than African Americans, so it’s all good from the point of view of colleges desperate for “diversity” but who don’t actually want to put up with African-Americans from the ‘hood.

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