The erasure of Black immigrants from our history has allowed a whitewashed version of this history to endure. This has enabled U.S. officials to treat Black immigrants from Africa and the Americas as illegitimate — as temporary workers rather than permanent immigrants, as economic migrants rather than asylum seekers or as people whose very presence has been criminalized.
Policies of inclusion — like the Diversity Visa lottery — are rare but significant because they cut against such long-standing erasure and exclusion. They also point to how the struggles for immigrant rights and for Black freedom are interconnected.
While the 19th century is often remembered for the migration of English, German and Irish people to the United States, Cape Verdeans were the first major community of Americans of African descent to voluntarily immigrate. In the early 20th century, Black immigrants — mostly from British Caribbean colonies — began coming to the United States in significant numbers, settling in New York, Miami, Boston and elsewhere.
By 1930, some 100,000 West Indian immigrants resided in the United States. Although their numbers were relatively small, their presence shaped neighborhoods and communities in important ways. Some were important Black nationalist and Pan-African leaders, artists, writers and thinkers, leaving an indelible mark on African American cultures. Even as the United States worked to curtail nearly all immigration in the 1920s, small numbers of African students came to American colleges and universities to study. Ghana’s independence leader Kwame Nkrumah and Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe both attended Lincoln University, an HBCU in Pennsylvania, for example. African students helped shape conversations about liberation on Black college campuses before returning home to build new nations.
World War II accelerated the arrivals of West Indians because the United States recruited guest workers from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados and elsewhere. With the nation mobilized for war, they came to replace American workers headed abroad to fight, especially in agriculture. They faced much the same discrimination and exploitation as African Americans, particularly in the Jim Crow South, but with the added wrinkle that they could be deported. The United States conceived of these migrants as temporary, disposable workers rather than immigrants to be incorporated permanently into American society. After the war, the United States extended the guest worker programs, even as it moved to reduce permanent immigration from Caribbean British colonies.
As the Black civil rights movement began to win key gains through federal legislation in the 1960s, policymakers also addressed what liberals viewed as an outdated and discriminatory immigration system. Ending racist national-origin quotas, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act formally opened immigration opportunities to the world beyond Northern and Western Europe.