The African Immigrant vs. African American Divide — And Who Benefits From It

There is a dinner table in Lagos, Nigeria, where a family is making a decision that will reverberate across two continents and three generations. The father is an engineer. The mother is a pharmacist. They have saved for a decade, leveraged family connections for visa sponsorship, and assembled the documentation that the U.S. immigration system demands. They are about to join the most educated immigrant group in the United States — a group that outperforms native-born white Americans on every metric of economic success that America claims to value — and they are about to discover that their success will be weaponized against 42 million Black Americans who share their skin color but almost nothing else about their experience. And there is a dinner table in Atlanta, Georgia, where an African American family is watching this arrival with a mixture of recognition and resentment that neither family fully understands and that the system that profits from their division has no interest in explaining.

The data is extraordinary and almost universally misrepresented. Nigerian Americans hold bachelor’s degrees at a rate of 61%, compared to 33% for the general U.S. population and 23% for African Americans. Their median household income exceeds the white American median. Ghanaian Americans, Ethiopian Americans, and Kenyan Americans show similar patterns of educational and economic overperformance. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, sub-Saharan African immigrants as a group are among the most educated demographic groups in the United States, with educational attainment rates that exceed those of Asian Americans, the group typically cited as the most educated.

This data is real. It is documented by the federal government’s own statistical apparatus. And it is being used, with increasing frequency and diminishing honesty, to argue that racism cannot be the primary obstacle to Black success in America, because if African immigrants — who are phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans in the eyes of the police officer, the landlord, the hiring manager — can succeed, then the failure of African Americans must be attributable to something other than racism. The argument is elegant. It is superficially logical. And it is built on a foundation of deliberate statistical ignorance that collapses the moment you apply the most basic principle of social science: selection bias.

The Selection Bias Nobody Mentions

Immigration is a filter. It is, in fact, the most aggressive positive-selection filter in human social organization. The people who emigrate from any country are not a random sample of that country’s population. They are, overwhelmingly, the best-educated, most ambitious, most resourceful, and most economically motivated members of their society. They have the cognitive ability to navigate a complex immigration system. They have the financial resources to fund the journey. They have the social capital to secure sponsorship. They have the psychological profile — high conscientiousness, high openness to experience, high risk tolerance — that predicts success in any environment.

The Migration Policy Institute, in its comprehensive analysis of African immigration to the United States, documented this selection effect in detail. Randy Capps and colleagues found that African immigrants were drawn disproportionately from the educational and economic elite of their home countries. A Nigerian who immigrates to the United States is not a typical Nigerian. He is a Nigerian who was in the top 5% of his country’s educational distribution, who had the resources and connections to obtain a visa, and who was selected by the U.S. immigration system precisely because of his skills, education, or family connections to other high-achieving immigrants. Comparing this hyper-selected population to the general African American population — which includes the descendants of enslaved people who were denied education for centuries, subjected to Jim Crow for another century, and concentrated by deliberate policy in under-resourced neighborhoods — is not comparing apples to oranges. It is comparing the valedictorian of one school to the entire student body of another and concluding that the first school must be better.

Darrick Hamilton, the economist whose research on stratification economics has reshaped the field, has argued that the African immigrant success story, far from disproving systemic racism, actually confirms it. If we accept that African immigrants arrive with exceptional human capital — education, skills, professional credentials — and we observe that despite this exceptional human capital, they still face racial discrimination in housing, employment, and policing, then the data demonstrates that racism operates independently of individual achievement. The Nigerian American doctor who is pulled over for driving while Black is experiencing the same racism as the African American mechanic in the car behind him. The immigrant’s degree does not protect him from the officer’s assumptions.

The Cultural Tensions

The division between African immigrants and African Americans is not merely a statistical artifact exploited by pundits. It is a lived reality, experienced in neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and families, and it is driven by misunderstandings on both sides that the broader system has no incentive to correct.

Many African immigrants arrive in the United States having absorbed, from American media exported globally, the same stereotypes about African Americans that white Americans hold. They have watched the same movies, consumed the same news narratives, and internalized the same associations between African Americans and criminality, laziness, and cultural dysfunction. When they arrive and encounter African American communities, some bring these stereotypes with them, and they express them in the form of social distancing: choosing to live in different neighborhoods, attend different churches, socialize within their national community rather than joining the broader Black American community. The distancing is not universal — many African immigrants embrace and are embraced by African American communities — but it is common enough to constitute a recognizable pattern.

From the African American side, the resentment is equally real and equally understandable. There is a perception — not entirely without foundation — that African immigrants benefit from the struggles of the civil rights movement without having participated in them. The doors that Nigerian Americans walk through — the desegregated universities, the anti-discrimination employment protections, the Voting Rights Act that makes their political participation possible — were opened by the blood and sacrifice of African Americans. The perception that immigrants benefit from these gains while distancing themselves from the community that produced them generates a bitterness that is difficult to discuss openly because it touches on questions of legitimacy, belonging, and who gets to claim membership in the Black American experience.

Jemima Pierre, the anthropologist whose work on Black identity and global racism has been influential in this conversation, has argued that both communities are responding rationally to a system that rewards their division. African immigrants who distance themselves from African Americans are attempting to claim the “model minority” status that the system offers to those who accept its terms: we will treat you as an exception, as long as you agree that the other Black people are the problem. African Americans who resent immigrant success are responding to the real economic competition that immigration creates in housing, employment, and educational access. Both responses are rational. Both are harmful. And both serve the interests of a system that benefits when Black communities are divided against themselves.

What Unites Is Greater Than What Divides

The shared vulnerabilities are devastating in their uniformity. A police officer conducting a traffic stop does not ask whether the driver’s parents came from Lagos or from Louisiana. A landlord screening tenants does not distinguish between an Igbo surname and an African American surname — both are Black, and both trigger the same discriminatory algorithms, whether automated or human. A hospital emergency room does not provide better care based on national origin — Black patients across the diaspora face the same documented disparities in pain management, diagnostic attention, and treatment outcomes.

The data on shared discrimination is unambiguous. Housing audit studies show that Black applicants of all national origins face higher denial rates for mortgages, are shown fewer properties by real estate agents, and are steered toward predominantly Black neighborhoods regardless of their income or credentials. Employment audit studies demonstrate that resumes with African names (whether Nigerian, Ghanaian, or African American) receive fewer callbacks than identical resumes with white-sounding names. Health outcome data shows that Black women of all national origins face maternal mortality rates three to four times higher than white women, suggesting that the discrimination operates on perceived race rather than cultural or national identity.

This shared vulnerability is the foundation on which coalition must be built. Not the erasure of difference — African immigrants and African Americans have genuinely different histories, cultures, and perspectives — but the recognition that the system does not care about those differences, and that a divided Black population is easier to exploit than a unified one.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
— Steve Biko

The Israeli-Diaspora Model

There is a precedent for this kind of coalition, and it operates with extraordinary effectiveness. The relationship between Israel and the global Jewish diaspora is not one of uniformity. Israeli Jews and American Jews disagree about almost everything — politics, religion, culture, the occupation. Ashkenazi and Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews maintain distinct cultural identities that they have no intention of surrendering. Ethiopian Jews who immigrated to Israel face discrimination within Israeli society that mirrors, in uncomfortable ways, the discrimination that African immigrants face in the United States. And yet, despite these differences, the Jewish community has built a framework of mutual support — financial, political, institutional — that operates across national boundaries and cultural divisions, because the community decided that what unites it (shared vulnerability, shared history, shared enemies) is more strategically important than what divides it.

The Black diaspora has not made this decision. The cultural, economic, and political connections between African immigrants, African Americans, Caribbean Americans, and Black Britons are ad hoc at best and hostile at worst. There is no institutional framework comparable to the Jewish Agency, the ADL, or AIPAC that coordinates political action across the Black diaspora. There are no diaspora bonds that channel immigrant capital back to shared community institutions. There is no unified political agenda that leverages the combined voting power of 45 million African Americans and 4.6 million Black immigrants.

Building the Coalition

The path forward requires both communities to abandon the positions that the system has assigned them. African immigrants must stop accepting the model minority narrative that the system offers them, because the narrative is a trap: it positions their success as evidence against the community with which they share the most fundamental vulnerability, and the moment their success becomes inconvenient to the prevailing narrative, the model minority status will be revoked, as it has been revoked from every other group that accepted it.

African Americans must stop treating immigrant success as an indictment of their own community, because the comparison is statistically invalid and the resentment it generates serves only the interests of those who benefit from Black division. The Nigerian American doctor and the African American teacher are not in competition. They are in the same system, facing the same obstacles at different points in their trajectories, and the energy spent resenting each other’s position would be better spent building institutions that serve both.

The practical agenda is straightforward. Shared political advocacy on issues that affect all Black people regardless of national origin: criminal justice reform, housing discrimination, healthcare disparities, educational equity. Economic cooperation that channels immigrant capital and African American institutional knowledge into shared ventures: community development financial institutions that serve all Black neighborhoods, business incubators that pair immigrant entrepreneurial drive with African American market knowledge, professional networks that span national-origin lines. Cultural exchange that builds understanding rather than reinforcing stereotypes: churches, community centers, and cultural organizations that deliberately create space for cross-community interaction.

None of this requires the erasure of difference. Nigerian Americans do not need to stop being Nigerian, and African Americans do not need to pretend that four centuries of unique American experience are interchangeable with the immigrant experience. The differences are real, and they enrich the broader community. But the shared vulnerability is also real, and it demands a shared response, because the system that discriminates against Black people does not consult immigration records before it discriminates. A house divided against itself cannot stand. That truth is old enough to be biblical and urgent enough to be today’s headline, and every year the division persists, both communities pay for it in ways that neither can afford.