₦airaland Forum

I disagree with you davidif. I, and many other Africans look at the issues when discussing this election. Sarah Palin linking Barack Obama to terrorism yesterday was the final straw for me. That was low, even for a 'dirty' election campaign. It's fine to dislike Obama, but dislike him based on his policies, not his f.ucking name, or any alleged links to terrorism.

The Democrats were wrong in saying that McCain/Palin represent 4 years of Bush / more of the same. The McCain/Palin ticket represents 4 years that'll be worse than the last 8 years of George Bush. They will make us enemies, not friends. They will deregulate healthcare even more, making it even more unaffordable. They will keep us in Iraq until the war is won (even though it's not a war, it's a free police service for Iraq), regardless of the fact that it's costing us billions. They will turn a blind eye to homeowners losing their homes. Sarah Palin also stated that the government should "step aside", yet she wants the government to be right in our business when it comes to issues that interfere with her religious beliefs, such as same sex marriage and abortion (she stated this during the VP debate with Biden).

Most of the garbage coming out of Sarah Palin's mouth is LIES, or stuff she's been programmed to say (which she recites in robot-like fashion). Now she's linking Barack Obama to terrorists who want to destroy this country -- way to go. I guess she's simply trying to appeal to the moronic crowd of neocons who yell "Barack Hussein Obama".

The woman is not only inexperienced, but she is also dangerous. She stated that if her and McCain were elected, she wants to expand the power of the Vice President -- a woman who has NEVER been to Washington in her whole life.

John McCain could have chosen a far better running mate; Tim Pawlenty, Charlie Crist, Mitt Romney to name but a few. I'm no fan of pretty much any Republican, but I'D have at least given John McCain credit for choosing a half-decent running mate, given the fact that his choice is far more crucial than Barack Obama's due to McCain's health and age being a factor in whether he'll be able to see out his first term.

Back to Sarah Palin; all that crap about 'Joe Sixpack' and 'Hockey moms' is nothing more than a feeble attempt of hers to make her look like an ordinary human being, not the power crazed, overly ambitious, arrogant lady that she is. During the VP debate, did any of you also notice that she showed NO emotion whatsoever when Joe Biden clearly choked up after he mentioned losing his wife & child in a car accident? She failed to answer most of the questions and she kept changing the subject, as if it were the 'Sarah Palin Show' on Fox News. She has no answers on the economy, she doesn't care about healthcare, or the millions of Americans who've either lost their homes, or are at risk of losing them.

Sarah Palin is obviously the new (ugly version of) Ann Coulter and I don't want her anywhere near Washington. People are losing their jobs, people are losing their homes and the economy is in serious rubbish right now. You'D think that at this stage, McCain/Palin would be focusing on the economy, not pandering to the "Barack Hussein Obama" crowd, none of whom would have voted for Obama anyway.

Sorry for the rant, but I don't just want the McCain/Palin ticket to get beaten; I want them to get wiped off the electoral map and humiliated (and I direct this more at Palin rather than McCain himself).

abdurrazaq:
blackspade is the right choice

Thanks, I wouldn't mind being the new moderator.

[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?

bump!

I can already imagine the fists being thrown. . . .

Kobojunkie:
Are you sure I am the bigot here?? Have you read anything you have posted so far on this thread?? Are you sure I am being cynical?? Do you even read

Typical. No surprises here, like I said before, I'll just let you continue on your tirade. . . . .

[quote author=davidylan* link=topic=177017.msg2886752#msg2886752 date=1223003811]so people still make the mistake of assuming Kobojunkie has the capacity to process complex information? [/quote]Sadly so, but since I'm not the only one who picked up on this, I think I'll just let "Kobo" continue being a "Junkie".

https://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/23/air_bags.jpg

Once again, she's way off the point.

No, I get many of them from here: http://www.veryfunnypics.com/ But shhhh. . . . Only between you & me

I find it ironic how everyone says "We need to stop the possible next Holocaust", when genocide in Africa is going on as we speak!

https://www.veryfunnypics.com/pics/gender/images/sosexy.jpg

^^ That woman better be careful!

https://www.veryfunnypics.com/pics/gender/images/bleachedblonde.jpg

She also has an extremely hard time at answering a question straight forward! She always goes way off the point.

She is so scripted. . . .

https://www.veryfunnypics.com/pics/microsoft/images/newmskeyboard.jpg

https://www.veryfunnypics.com/pics/sports/images/zzzouchbaseball.jpg

https://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/27/improperuse.gif

^^ I agree, glad his tirade is nearly over!

https://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/41/huge_boobs.jpg

[center]https://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/48/Hillary_look.jpg

"Someone get this White Woman away from me"[/center]

Kobojunkie:
Did you even bother to read the article? Or anything at all on the subject?

Yes I did. The reason I made my comment, because I know exactly what America is trying to "get at". Who are they to tell Nigeria not to associate with a country, where they can't even prove they have nuclear arms? It may not say that in those exact words in the article, but anyone who is capable of putting anything in perspective, can see that's what they're trying to say.

I'm growing very agitated with America sticking their big noses into out Affairs. The reason for Nuclear research in Nigeria, is to solve constant power problems, not to arm ourselves with Nuclear Arms. Day by Day, it's continually starting to feel like a "New World Order" is trying to form. . .

I'm not trying to sound like a cynic or anything, but I'm not all the way convinced by this article, when looking at the state of Naija today. We do have oil, but we need to diversify our economy tremendously to even imagine being among the worlds largest economies. In the coming years, I'D want to see Nigeria become a manufacturing powerhouse, with agriculture being a big industry also. Other areas that deserve major investments in are the IT industries, and tourism. The southern coasts are just begging for world class resorts, and the IT field is already slowly being invested in as we speak. The Film making industry (Nollywood) has major potential too as a major driving force to pull our economy up tremendously.

With all of the above being said, I believe if our government would pay attention to diversifying the economy even more off of oil, I can really see Nigeria being in the ranks of the Worlds 20 largest economies. Leadership and personal will needs to be major also. I notice Entrepreneurship in Naija needs to be promoted on a wide scale, because honestly there needs to be more of us opening up businesses in our cities, to build this economy ourselves too.

What does everyone else think?

[center]Nigeria to be among top 20 leading economy's by 2020[/center]

Minister of State for Finance, Mr Remi Babalola, yesterday expressed confidence that Nigeria will definitely be in the league of the 20 leading economies of the world by 2020.

Babalola, who spoke to THISDAY via telephone, on the occasion of the 48th Independence Anniversary, said the gap between poverty and prosperity is not as wide as people think.


He said, "transforming from poverty to prosperity is a reality closer than many people think, as basic structures are getting embedded and with clear vision, Nigerian passion and superior leadership, I am more encouraged that the future is bright.

"There is formula for success, we have seen it in China, India , Korea , Singapore and to a lesser extent in Malaysia and Indonesia . Nigerian possibilities and potentials give me fillip to see Nigeria as a member of G20 in 12 years. Be upbeat," he added.

Advising government officials in positions of key responsibilities in the country, Babalola said, "as managers of our various economies, to pursue initiatives aimed at strengthening fiscal responsibility, public procurement and effective management of debts, we must ensure that more resources are allocated to projects that have direct bearing and touch the lives of the common man.

He said the channels we allocate our resource is a major determinant of what beckons our society in the far horizon and philosophizsed that, "we are a blessed nation because we are a free nation. We are a blessed nation because we are a nation that understands there are responsibilities attached to the various offices at all levels of governance in the federation.

"Let us use this golden opportunity to upscale our service delivery and the surest way to do that is to help improve the lot of humanity to the glory of God. It is worthy and a noble venture, he said.

AllAfrica

Since you insist on being very bigoted, by all means carry on with your tirade of "cynic-ness".

And your point being? Nearly everything on this forum you come across, where Africans are being mistreated, you're usually the first one to either deny it, or ask something on the lines of what they did to deserve it. Do you want me to bring up quotes from you? At lease I'm not in denial. . .

It's amazing how ignorant some people can be, and still use a computer.

Thank you for pointing that out RichyBlacK, it's disheartening to know that out own people deny their own success in America.

The Invisible Model Minority

This is not just limited to us African immigrants, but also Caribbean immigrants (Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, etc. . .)