Nigerian American
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nigerian Americans are citizens of the United States of America who are of Nigerian heritage or were born in Nigeria and emigrated to the United States of America. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, approximately one million Nigerians have immigrated to the United States.[citation needed] Repeating their proportion of population on the continent of Africa, Nigerians are the single largest contemporary African immigrant group in the United States, far outpacing smaller immigrant groups from Ghana and Liberia. They rival the number of African-descended immigrants from the Caribbean, such as those from Jamaica and Haiti. Nigeria's current indigenous population is 140 million. It is estimated that 20 million more reside outside Nigeria, with the majority living in the United Kingdom (see Nigerian British) and the United States. Most recent immigrants from Nigeria have been well-educated and their children have easily entered the middle and upper classes in the United States.
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[edit] History
[edit] Early History
The first people of Nigerian ancestry in what is now modern United States came as slaves from the 17th century onwards.[1] However, under conditions in the colonies, masters were less interested in tribal origins, which often were not recorded or disappeared. After two and three centuries of residence in the United States and the loss of records through enslavement, African Americans have often been unable to track their ancestors to specific tribes or regions of Africa.
Some Nigerian tribes, such as the Yorubas, and some northern Nigerian tribes developed tribal facial identification marks that could assist a returning slave in relocating his tribe's people. However, slave owners did not allow this practice to continue in the colonies. They sometimes mixed people of different tribes to make it more difficult to communicate and reduce their banding together in rebellion.[2] Nonetheless, people communicate and create something new. Due to the creative interaction of cultures over time, creolization of languages and culture occurred. Some of the lexical aspects (or vocabulary) of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called black English, evolved from African languages. The Gullah language of African Americans in the Low Country of South Carolina and Georgia particularly kept its African roots because of the concentration of Africans there. [3]
[edit] Modern History
Due to hundreds of years living in different cultures, African Americans of Nigerian descent who are descended from enslaved peoples have developed a unique culture that is different than that of recent immigrants from Nigeria.
Most modern Nigerian immigrants have come to the United States to pursue educational opportunities in both undergraduate and post-graduate institutions. Almost all of these immigrants came from the various ethnic groups in the southern part of the country, primarily among the Igbo, Yoruba, Ibibio people including Annang and Efik.[citation needed] Due to adverse economic conditions in Nigeria, some immigrants stayed in the United States and began to raise their families as first-generation American citizens.
During the mid- to late-1980s, a larger wave of Nigerians immigrated to the United States. This migration was driven by political and economic problems exacerbated by the military regimes of self-styled generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha.
The most noticeable exodus occurred among professional and middle-class Nigerians who, along with their children, took advantage of education and employment opportunities in the United States. Some believe that this exodus has contributed to a "brain-drain" on Nigeria's intellectual resources to the detriment of its future. Since the advent of multi-party democracy in March 1999, the former Nigerian head-of-state Olusegun Obasanjo has made numerous appeals, especially to young Nigerian professionals in the United States, to return to Nigeria to help in its rebuilding effort. Obasanjo's efforts have met with mixed results, as some potential migrants consider Nigeria's socio-economic situation still unstable.[citation needed]
[edit] Education
African immigrants in general have the highest educational attainment of any immigrant group in the United States, with higher levels of completed education than Asian Americans, who have been stereotyped as a model minority.[4] It is not only the first generation that performs well, as estimates indicate that a disproportionate percentage of black students at elite universities are immigrants or children of immigrants. Harvard University, for example, has estimated that more than one-third of its black student body consists of recent immigrants or their children, or were mixed race. [5] Other top universities, such as Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Duke and Berkeley, report a similar pattern.[6] As a result, there is a question whether affirmative action programs adequately serve those African Americans who are descendants of American slaves.[7]
A growing number of Nigerian Americans are affluent and well educated. Many possess college degrees and have graduated with advanced diplomas in engineering, law, business and medicine from top institutions like Harvard, Yale, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Stanford, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, University of Virginia among others. Today most affluent Nigerians are concentrated in the field of medicine; however, many are employed in Fortune 500 companies or are self-made entrepreneurs.[citation needed] and many are American university professors.
[edit] Areas of Concentrated Residence
The USA has the world's third largest Nigerian community, only behind Nigeria itself and the United Kingdom, where almost half a million Nigerians reside. Like other successful immigrant populations in the United States, Nigerian Americans reside in virtually all 50 states. Sizeable communities are concentrated in the following areas:
1. Maryland: Prince Georges, Baltimore and Montgomery counties
2. New York: All boroughs of New York City, Nassau and Westchester counties
3. Texas: Harris, Fort Bend, Tarrant, Dallas counties
4. Georgia: Cobb, Dekalb, Fulton, Gwinnett counties
5. New Jersey: Hudson, Essex, Bergen, Union and Middlesex counties
6. Illinois: Cook County
7. California: Alameda, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego, Sacramento, Contra Costa counties and the San Francisco Bay Area
8. Ohio: Hamilton and Montgomery counties
9. Rhode Island: Providence County
| Ancestry | 1990 | 1990% of US population | 2000 | 2000% of US population | Percent change from 1990 to 2000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Nigerian |
35,300 | negligible (no data) | 165,481 | negligible (no data) | 368.8% |
 Ethiopian |
27,200 | negligible (no data) | 86,918 | negligible (no data) | 219.6% |
 Ghanaian |
14,900 | negligible (no data) | 49,944 | negligible (no data) | 235.2% |
 South Africa |
15,690 | negligible (no data) | 45,569 | negligible (no data) | 190.4% |
| Other | 136,910 | negligible (no data) | 292,088 | negligible (no data) | 113.3% |
| TOTAL | 230,000 | 0.1% | 640,000 | 0.2% | 166.9% |
[edit] References
- ^ The Slave Trade
- ^ Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: "Lucumi" and "Nago" as Ethnonyms in West Africa
- ^ African Americans
- ^ AsianNation.org [1]
- ^ The New York Times, Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
- ^ Berkeley, SF Chronicle
- ^ New York Times [2] Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?, accessed 7 Mar 2008]
- ^ Brittingham, Angela. Ancestry 2000:Census Brief. 2004. October 30, 2006. [3]
[edit] See also
- List of topics related to Black and African people
- Africans in the United States
- Nigeria
- Immigration
[edit] External links
- Nigerian Village Square
- Nigerians in America
- Nigerian-American Community Association (U.S.A.), Inc.
- Nigerian-American Public Professionals Association
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