American History, Race and the Struggle for Equality by Masaki Kawashima

Author:Masaki Kawashima
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

3 Who Is Responsible for the Adverse Circumstances of the “Underclass”?

3.1 Praise for Black Immigrants

As the new Immigration Act of 1965 took effect, the number of immigrants from the Caribbean and West Africa increased. According to the latest statistics, the total number of immigrants of African ancestry between 2000 and 2010 amounted to about 2.8 million, doubling in a decade, with 1.7 million from the West Indies and the rest from African nations. They tend to live together in the inner cities in the northeastern coastal states. Their family patterns differ from that of African Americans. Seventy-one percent of the West Indian and West African immigrants’ children live in a two-parent household, while for African Americans, 39 percent of children live with both parents. 17

There is a remarkable trend for shop owners in the larger cities like New York to respond to hiring pressures by consciously employing black-skinned immigrants. Jennifer Lee, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, conducted fieldwork in West Harlem, New York, in the late 1990s. She found that 67 percent of the black employees in the Jewish-owned shops, 76 percent in the Korean-owned shops, and 55 percent in the African American-owned shops were foreign born. If the demands of Affirmative Action were to employ Blacks, the shop owners, regardless of their “race,” preferred West Indians or West Africans as they supposedly had a better work ethic. In Boston, business owners prefer Cape Verdeans—even though their mother tongue is not English but Portuguese—to native-born African Americans due to the former’s so-called better work ethic, which sometimes means their willingness to work hard under bad labor conditions. At any rate, African Americans are compelled to compete in the local labor market with these newcomers who are eligible for Affirmative Action’s “quota” and willing to work for very low wages. 18

Due to the “quota system” used in admissions to higher education institutions, the highly motivated younger generation of the above-mentioned Black immigrants can access universities and professional graduate schools much easier than before the enactment of the two federal civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965. On the other hand, a large number of the second and third generation Black immigrants are influenced by the inner-city “underclass culture” of poverty and crime. With the daily temptations and pressures from these negative environmental influences it is difficult for them to have the same motivation their parents had. As Jacqueline Jones observes (1993), the forerunners of this downward assimilation were the migrants from the rural South to the urban North, who had been relatively highly motivated workers, but gradually lost their initial enthusiasm. Institutional racism was so strong in the North that the second and third generations were being “assimilated” downward to what they were “supposed” to behave like as people with black skin. The origins of the “underclass” in the urban North were de facto segregation and institutional racism. Mainstream America, especially whites in the North, tended to take it for granted that the domestic Black migrants from the South were unassimilable.

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