In Immigration and the Remaking of Black America, sociologist Tod G. Hamilton confronts the trope that black immigrants have always achieved social and economic outcomes superior to African Americans. While conventional narratives pathologize African Americans as being culturally deficient compared to immigrants, Hamilton challenges this interpretation and offers a new reading of how black immigration trends are shaping the United States by using original and innovative statistical analysis. In eight chapters, Hamilton attempts to provide a new framework to understand an array of socio-economic disparities among the black population of America.Weaving together history and sociology, Hamilton examines the outcomes of black immigrants from fourteen countries across Africa and the Caribbean. The early chapters provide a sweeping yet thoughtful synthesis of black immigration since the twentieth century, the extant literature on labor market disparities, and Hamilton's own theoretical considerations. Importantly, Hamilton documents how scholars have feuded over how to weigh assumptions of cultural inferiority against structural barriers when comparing African Americans to black immigrants. Though the former has often been presumed, Hamilton posits that empirical evidence does not lend support to cultural theories. Rather, prior comparisons have failed to fully account for variations within the black immigrant population, the changing racial contexts from pre- and post–civil rights eras, and the implications of selective migration.In the remaining chapters, Hamilton uses regressions and statistical modeling to explore historical and contemporary disparities in labor market outcomes, homeownership, health, and intermarriage. Though inequalities between whites and blacks are stark, Hamilton employs three methodological tools that prove instructive and reveal gaps between black immigrants and African Americans as well as within the African American population itself. First, when comparing black immigrants vis-à-vis African Americans, Hamilton disaggregates the latter into “movers” (those who internally migrated, traditionally from South to North) and “nonmovers,” in order to better reflect the positive effects of selective migration and hold any questions of cultural difference constant. This distinction proves pivotal in his investigation and helps to account for various unobserved factors. Second, Hamilton implements a cohort analysis that traces black immigrant populations over their tenure in the United States. Lastly, Hamilton provides a detailed gendered analysis that reveals how black immigrant women fair in relation to both their male counterparts as well as African American women. Hamilton adds further nuance by separating black immigrants by native country to uncover new regional disparities. While readers untrained in sociological statistics may find Hamilton's models complicated, his analysis and interpretation are clear and incisive.In almost all contemporary areas of analysis, black immigrants have similar or slightly better outcomes than African American movers, who in turn, consistently outperform nonmovers. In reviewing labor market disparities, Hamilton's findings challenge prior assumptions that black Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century held advantages over African Americans. While their outcomes did improve with their duration in the United States, contemporary data reveals that over time almost all black immigrant labor force participation rates converge or surpass those of black and white Americans. In regard to homeownership, newly landed black immigrants own homes at lower rates than African Americans. However, using cohort analysis, Hamilton determines that homeownership rates of all black immigrant arrival cohorts since 1970 have improved, converged, or surpassed those of African American movers. Moreover, while health statistics reveal some of the widest racial disparities, black immigrants report “fair” or “poor” health at the same rate as white Americans. Interestingly, Hamilton finds that immigrant health deteriorates over time, possibly due to exposure to the effects of racism and discrimination. Lastly, intermarriage is one of the best indicators of social acceptance. Since the civil rights movement, white intermarriage with Hispanics and Asians has increased considerably; intermarriage with blacks, however, accounts for only 12 percent of all interracial marriages. Hamilton's findings lead him to conclude that W.E.B. Du Bois's color line of the twentieth century has shifted from Black-White to one that is Black-Nonblack. Together these findings indicate that both selective migration and historical context—namely migration in the post–Civil Rights Era—play a pivotal role in shaping immigrant outcomes.While Black Immigration challenges long-held notions of cultural inferiority, uncovers new patterns of stratification, and encourages future researchers to disaggregate the black population, some may find that it does not appropriately grapple with the impact of mass incarceration. Though Hamilton notes incarceration as a methodological limitation, he only does so as a variable impacting African Americans. Mass incarceration is a defining structure of modern American racial politics and Hamilton emphasizes the role of historical context and the post–Civil Rights Era as important for shaping immigrant outcomes, yet the book does not consider how the carceral system impacts black immigrants. Nevertheless, Hamilton presents socio-economic data and comprehensive analysis that will prove useful to historians and sociologists alike.
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Aug 29, 2024
Aigerim Alpysbekova + 11
Open Access