Blog
Feb 10

‘Africans in US more educated than other immigrants’

New York, California and Texas are the top three states that are home to the majority of African expats, according to the US Census Bureau.

A five-year estimate of the American Community Survey released last year indicates that there are currently 1.6 million African born people are living  in the United States.

The three biggest African-born populations in America come from the three most populous countries in Africa — Nigeria (14%), Ethiopia (10.4%) and Egypt (9%).

Some of the major metropolitan areas with sizable African communities include New York City, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Columbus, Philadelphia, Providence, Wilmington, Minneapolis-St Paul, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont.

The numbers further show that Africans in the United States tend to be more educated in comparison with other recent immigrant groups.

In New York, for example, where the largest number of African immigrants live, The New York Times points out that “30 percent of African-born blacks in NYC had a college degree, compared with 22 percent of native-born blacks, 18 percent of Caribbean-born blacks and 19 percent of the non-black foreign born.”

On a national level, according to the same census, 41% of the African-born population in the United States obtained bachelor degrees or higher between 2008 and 2012 compared with 28% of the overall foreign-born US population.

Click here to see where Africans live in America.