Wakanda is Real: An Analysis of the Causal Determinants of African Migration to the United States from 1950-2016

Abstract

This paper begins by reviewing the existing literature on the domestic and international determinants of African migration to the United States and settlement within specific regions of the country. The topic is motivated by the current discussion within U.S. academic and political institutions on the motivating factors for immigration from the Global South to the United States. This issue is especially timely given the U.S. government’s recent installation of E.O. 13769, which bars the entry of immigrants from select Muslim-majority countries in Africa and the Middle East. Both proponents and dissenters of the policy are concerned with the rationale for restricting immigration from these countries, and this discussion is motivated by the question of why immigrants, particularly those from the African sub continent, decide to emigrate to the United States. This paper attempts to analyze this question by focusing on the U.S. domestic and international determinants of African migration to the United States, while applying these theories to the question of regional settlement of African ethnic groups within the United States from 1950 to 2016. In the U.S. domestic determinant section of the paper, I test the effect of trips to nine African countries made by predominantly Democratic Black Congressional leaders in unison with the InterAction Commission on Migration and Refugee Affairs (CMRA) between the years 1996-1998. Through a fixed-effects regression analysis I discover that contrary to Heidi Boas’ 2007 theory, the CMRA and Congressional Black Caucus’ role as an interest group did not have a statistically significant effect on the number of African immigrants admitted to the United States when controlling for the low presence of institutional veto points. In the international determinant section of the paper, I examine the widely circulated theory within African Studies and Comparative Politics that colonial rule has a strong relationship with ethnic conflict in African countries. I applied this theory to test the effect of type of colonial rule on Reed6 the flow of African immigration to the United States. Upon repeating a fixed-effects regression analysis, I found a significant relationship between Anglophone-speaking African countries and increased immigration to the United States from Africa. Furthermore, the effect increased along with ethnic conflict. In the final section of this paper, I took a more microscopic analytical approach to observing the determinants of migration by focusing specifically on the determinants of regional settlement in the United States for three African countries which are currently, or were previously, restricted under the travel ban: Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. I conducted interviews with recently arrived immigrants from each of these respective countries to understand how the domestic and international determinants for migration to the United States, which are discussed in the first two chapters, can be used to inform the reasons for settling within specific states and cities.