ImmigrationDespite advances, Black immigrants in U.S. still suffer racial disparities

TheBlack Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), along withNew York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, last week released a two-part report on the experience of Black immigrants in the United States. The report — The State of Black Immigrants — sheds light on the issues facing the over 3.7 million immigrants in the United States from Africa, the Caribbean, Afro-Latino countries, and elsewhere, due in large part to their race.

“As this report shows, Black immigrants encounter major social and economic challenges in the United States because of systemic racism,” says Opal Tometi, BAJI’s executive director and a co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter.

BAJI says that notable findings in the report include:

• The number of undocumented Black immigrants in the United States increased by nearly 50 percent from 389,000 in 2000 to 602,000 in 2013
• Despite high educational attainment, nearly 1 in 5 Black immigrants live below the poverty line.
• Black immigrants have the highest unemployment rates amongst all immigrant groups.
• More than one out of every five non-citizens facing deportation on criminal grounds before the Executive Office of Immigration Review is Black.
• Black immigrants are more likely to be detained and deported for criminal convictions than other immigrant groups.
• Black immigrants in removal proceedings for a criminal conviction often have lived in the United States for a long time and established strong community ties; many are apprehended and placed in deportation proceedings long after the triggering criminal conviction occurred.

Part I of the report provides recently updated demographic data on immigration status, country of origin, geographic location within the United States, educational attainment, household income, labor force participation, and eligibility for forms of immigration relief for Black immigrants. Part II focuses on the impact of mass criminalization on Black immigrants providing newly released data on detention and deportation rates for Black immigrants.

BAJI notes that the report’s release coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, one of two laws passed in 1996 which expanded the grounds for deportation to include over twenty criminal and noncriminal offenses. According to the report, these laws have overwhelmingly impacted Black immigrants, who tend to live in communities that are subject to over policing and controversial practices such as “stop-and-frisk” and “broken windows policing.”

Some of BAJI’s policy recommendations include: removing convictions as a grounds for deportation and/or exclusion from the United States, including aggravated felonies and drug offenses; expanding executive action programs that provide relief for Black immigrants; restoring judicial discretion and due process for all individuals who come into contact with the criminal justice and immigration systems; and eliminating the criminal bars to programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

According to Carl Lipscombe, BAJI’s policy manager and a co-author of the report, “Unfortunately, research on Black immigrants is scant because the government does not maintain data on immigrants based on race. But this report shows that racial injustices are pervasive within the immigration system. We urge the government to improve race-based tracking and expand the overall body of research available on Black immigrants.”

— Read more in State of Black Immigrants Report Part I: A Statistical Portrait of Black Immigrants in the United States (BAJI, September 2016); and State of Black Immigrants Part II: Black Immigrants in the Mass Criminalization System (BAJI, September 2016)