Years of Since Migration: On the Motivation to Reexamine the Role of Immigrant Selectivity in Black Ethnic Labor Market Disparities

Before sharing my response to her very thoughtful comments, I would like to thank Professor Susan Model for her foundational contributions to this important subfield and the opportunity to further develop and discuss my thinking on the relative labor market success of African Americans and Black immigrants. After reading her canonical text, West Indian Immigrants: A Black Success Story (Model 2008), I actually began my investigation expecting that introducing measures of soft skills would greatly attenuate earnings disparities between African Americans and first-generation English-speaking Afro Caribbean immigrants (ES Afro Caribbeans). Therefore, while Professor Model and I agree that these disparities are not likely a result of cultural differences (Ifatunji 2016; Model 2008), the findings that I would eventually share in my paper, “Labor Market Disparities Between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans,” were initially quite “unexpected” (Ifatunji 2017:531, 535).