On January 13, the NY Times published an article on what it calls a “hidden wave” of black migrants who are coming to the city from Latin America.
As background, the Times cites a report from the Pew Research Center, issued last January, that found that as many as 10 percent of blacks in the U.S. are foreign born. Pew determined that in 2019 the country hosted 4.6 million Africa-born blacks, up from about 800,000 in 1980. About two million of them arrived in America in 2019 alone. And the numbers do not even include foreign-born blacks from the Caribbean, which make up a full third of all black immigrants.
Many of those immigrants and illegal migrants find their way to New York City, which has the largest black immigrant population of any metropolitan area–about 1.1 million in 2019.
Most of the recently arrived migrants come to New York by way of Latin American countries such as Mexico and Brazil, where in many cases they have lived for years. As with their fellow, non-black, Latino migrants, they have been encouraged by welcoming talk from the Biden administration to seek their economic fortunes in the U.S., and particularly in New York City.
The Times laments the alleged fact that, contrary to the highly publicized arrivals of Latino migrants, the influx of blacks has been “overlooked.” It points to a single individual who has embarked on a personal quest to welcome all who come: Imam Omar Niass, a Muslim cleric who houses up to 170 in the Masjid Ansar Mosque in the Bronx, which is also his home. Niass is himself an immigrant, from Senegal, as are many of the Africans he hosts.
One such Senegalese migrant admitted to Africanews last fall that “the conditions in Senegal aren’t bad, but the problem is that when you finish your studies, it is difficult to get a job.” Of course, such economic reasons are insufficient for securing asylum in the United States, but today’s open-borders policies seldom emphasize that nicety.
And so they come, in sufficient numbers that a neighborhood in central Harlem is now called “Little Senegal.” Although NYC claims the largest number of black immigrants, other American cities contain large numbers as well. Washington, DC, for example, hosts 260,000, many of them Ethiopians, while Miami claims nearly half a million, the majority Haitian. Other cities hosting large numbers of foreign-born blacks are Atlanta, Boston, Houston, and Dallas.
Pew Research found that black migrants coming to those and other American cities have increased the overall black population in the U.S. by 19 percent since 1980. By 1960, blacks are predicted to total about 62 million; approximately one third of the overall increase will be from immigration.
For more, see the NY Times.