Cultural Conflict: Second generation African immigrant children in the United States

It was estimated in 1996 that there were 24.6 million immigrants in the United States (U.S Census Bureau 1998) what Portes (1990) and Rumbaut (1995) have termed today’s immigrants the “permanent unfinished society” of immigrants. It is this “unfinished society” of immigrants’ that contemporary African immigrants are a part of. Since the end of forced migration in the mid eighteen hundred only a small number of African immigrants have been able to come to United States compared to other groups of immigrants. For instance, from 1820 to 1993 America took in only 418,000 African immigrants according to Immigration and Naturalization records, while 345,425 Asians came to America just in 1993 (Adugna, 1998). Two thirds of all African immigrants currently in the United States arrived after 1980. According to the 1990 census, African born immigrants numbered 364,000. The authors of this paper speculates that the reasons as to why the number of African immigrants in the United Stated was and still is relatively small compared to other immigrants from other continents, is the difficult process of obtaining a visa to emigrate into the United States and the long and expensive journey that is in many ways beyond the reach of many African families.