Abstract: Black immigrants are a demographically and socially important group in the United States. Between 1960 and 2005 the foreign-born share of the entire black population increased twenty-two fold. Furthermore, this group also accounted for more than 20% of the growth in the black population in the 2000s. In spite of the rapid growth of the black immigrant population, few studies have evaluated their health and labor market outcomes. The existing literature on black immigrants demonstrates that this group has health outcomes that are substantially different from those of other immigrant populations. Research illustrates that most black immigrants arrive in the United States with better health than black Americans and maintain this health advantage after more than two decades in the United States. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced among African immigrants. Research in this area also demonstrates that certain subgroups of black immigrants, such as West Indians, have superior labor market outcomes compared to black Americans. Because of the phenotypic similarities between these two groups, these findings have led some scholars and policymakers to question the salience of discrimination and racism in determining the labor market outcomes of black Americans. This dissertation expands the literature on the health and labor market outcomes of black immigrants by evaluating the salience of the major sociological theories, including immigrant versus native culture, bias of whites toward black immigrants over black Americans, and selective migration in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between black immigrants and black Americans. In an effort to better understand the unique health patterns among black immigrants, this dissertation also advances and tests a conceptual model that evaluates whether social, economic, and health conditions within the sending countries of black immigrants explain variations in health and disability among these immigrants. This dissertation uses data on males from the 1980-2000 U.S. Censuses and the 2001-2007 American Community Survey to estimate wage, employment, and self-employment models to determine if black immigrants have outcomes that resemble those of native blacks (collectively) or native black internal migrants. The results suggest that migration selectivity is important in explaining wage and employment differences between black immigrants and black natives. However, migration selectivity plays a limited role in explaining self-employment differences between black immigrants and black natives. This general finding is produced when black immigrants are evaluated collectively and when they are separated by both region and country of birth. This result suggests that differences that exist between black immigrants and black natives are the result of selective migration rather than culture. This work is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the importance of selective migration in explaining labor market differences between black Americans and black immigrants from all the major sending regions and countries of the world. This work also uses data on black immigrants from the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 March Current Population Survey to evaluate the role that conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin play in explaining variation in health and disability among black immigrants in the United States. Estimates from reduced form health and disability models show that these outcomes are more favorable for immigrants who migrate from countries with high combined enrollment ratios, low income inequality, and high life expectancy. The results also demonstrate that country of origin conditions explain some portion of differences in health among immigrants. / text

Thesis advisor: David L. Blustein / Recent immigration into the United States is characterized by an increase in the influx of people from Latin America, Asia and Africa (Larsen, 2004). The increased diversity of the immigrant population calls for greater attention to the needs of this population, particularly as immigrants and their children are entering the education system. A growing body of literature documents the experience of immigrant youth in schools and the implications of school engagement, and academic achievement for their future success (e.g., Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco & Todorova 2008). Vocational and ethnic identity represent different aspects of the implementation of the individual's self concept which are relevant to students' academic engagement and success (Kenny, Blustein, Haase, Jackson & Perry, 2006; Suárez-Orozco, et. al., 2008). Previous research has examined separately the contribution of perceptions of discrimination and vocational variables to the school engagement experiences of immigrant students and students of color respectively; however, the collective contribution of these variables has not been studied. The present study brings together these two bodies of literature to understand the relationship between school engagement, perceptions of discrimination, vocational and ethnic identity variables in a sample of 125 Cape Verdean immigrant students. The participants were first through second generation high school students with at least three years of residence in the US. Specific ethnic/ acculturation profiles (ethnic, national, bicultural, and diffuse) developed by previous researchers were confirmed in this sample. Differences were found in perceptions of discrimination between those students in the bicultural and diffuse profiles. The results of a regression analysis indicate that perceived discrimination moderates the relationship between vocational variables (career planfulness and vocational identity) and school engagement. The third set of hypotheses, examining vocational variables as mediators of the relationship between perceptions of discrimination and school engagement were not supported. The findings highlight the importance of including considerations of ethnicity, acculturation and perceptions of discrimination as one considers the academic and vocational functioning of immigrant students. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

This dissertation explores the transnational care perspectives and practices of black immigrants working on the frontlines of eldercare in Greater Boston. Responding to the critical shortage of caregivers for the burgeoning aging population, first-generation immigrants from African and Caribbean countries find work in this field, performing physically and emotionally grueling work as Home Health Aides and Certified Nursing Assistants for low pay and few benefits. At the same time that these caregivers provide the most intimate care for older Americans and adults with disabilities, they often take on caring responsibilities for their aging relatives abroad. Evidence from fifty in-depth interviews with African and Caribbean caregivers reveals that these immigrants are changing the climate of eldercare in the U.S. as well as in their countries of origin by providing eldercare-specific economic and social remittances to their families abroad and fictive kinship through creative emotion work for their clients in the United States. These practices are informed by their transnational social location and work experiences which expose these caregivers to different state systems and care cultures. A dual evaluation of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of national eldercare systems produces for them a general definition of compassionate eldercare as the delivery of life saving medical care and skillful emotion work that ensure elders feel dignity in body and mind. Along with perceived cultural differences, these caregivers identify income inequality and weak welfare regimes as producing atmospheres of resource deficit and emotional deficit in the countries of origin and country of settlement, respectively. These perceptions provoke these caregivers to attend to the observed deficit and provide well-balanced compassionate care for their dependents, whether family member or client. These immigrant caregivers derive a sense of agency and pride from "filling the voids" in care for their clients and family members, arming them with a positive transnational caring identity strategy that helps guard against racism and marginalization they often experience on the job. Taken together, these findings reveal new ways of thinking about eldercare best practices and illustrate how actors at the micro level can inform institutional change at the global level.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-232). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Currently, a permeating ethos of racial transcendence mystifies the perpetuity of institutionalized inequality, restrains the dissolution of discriminatory practices, and renders race-based protest unutterable. Migrant Black Mothers examines how this apparatus of exclusion unfolds in the lives of native and immigrant black mothers of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The study reveals that these women collectively bear visions of freedom that disrupt the normalization of their oppression. It asserts that while navigating a milieu that relegates their lives, and those of their children’s to a precarious existence, black mothers locate resolve on borderlands widely deemed marred by interethnic dissonance. African American, African-born, and Caribbean-born mothers seek one another across ethnic lines and in their migrations jointly resist the co-existing forces of structural and ideological stigmatization. Utilizing documentary evidence and original ethnographic research in Hartford, Connecticut, the dissertation illuminates and traces black mothers’ cross-ethnic ties of resistance over the course of three thematic sections. Part I, “Traversing Borders and Unsettling Distortions,” chronicles native and foreign-born black mothers’ encounters with gendered racism. It traces how controlling images that legitimize the violation of black mothers travels, as well as evolves, across ethnic lines. Further, Part I suggests that native and immigrant black mothers stifle gendered racism by co-creating safe spaces. Part II, “Behind the Netted Veil of Racial Transcendence,” revisits cases involving the state-sanctioned killings of Aquan Salmon, Amadou Diallo, and Trayvon Martin. It charts how in the aftermath of these cases, African American, African, and Caribbean mothers developed collective narratives of trauma as a means to contest the color-blind assessments of the cases. The last section, “A Motherline Conceived from Disparate Roots,” documents black mothers’ efforts to instill a racial consciousness in their children in a climate that promotes race neutrality. Diasporic, communal mothering arises as essential to this process. Fueled by the voices and realities of African American, African, and Caribbean mothers, shaped by interacting systems of power, the dissertation invites the telling of an often unspoken avenue of justice in the face of enduring black disadvantage. / 2023-01-12T00:00:00Z

This study explains the labor market outcomes of foreign-born Haitian women and men employed in the long-term care industry in Philadelphia, PA. The study is a feminist geographic analysis of their social networks related to migration and employment. This analysis is significant for two reasons. First it provides a more nuanced understanding of the linkages between the geography of networks, migration, and labor market outcomes than currently exists. Furthermore by exploring how people’s multiple social identities shape the geography of social networks, migration, and labor market outcomes, the study integrates geographic and intersectional analyses and brings feminist geography to the center of contemporary feminist debates. I engaged in an inductive qualitative research study consisting of interviews and participation observation fieldwork. I conducted in-depth interviews with 18 women and 12 men currently working in the long-term care industry, along the nursing occupational hierarchy. These interviews focused on explicating the relationships among the geography of place-based social networks, the dynamic and complex intersections of multiple social identities, and occupational mobility. Interviews examined the nature, spatial extent and significance of the social network connections that shaped their labor market, educational, and migratory histories, as well as their current daily activities. I interviewed six key informants from Haitian community groups and immigrant nonprofit organizations to gain additional information about the Haitian community in Philadelphia and the role of social network composition and use. I also interviewed seven key informants affiliated with nurse training and job placement organizations to gain more information about the trends in this field. Finally, I conducted participant observation fieldwork at three nursing program recruitment information sessions. This research is a timely intervention that brings together the academic literature of feminist geographic inquiry about urban labor markets, feminist geographic inquiry about migration, migration studies, and the feminist theory of intersectionality. The scholarship of each of these has developed along parallel but separate trajectories. By bringing them in conversation with one another, this research makes important contributions to a number of important theoretical and empirical debates within each of them. The project advanced migration studies by documenting the multiscalar geography of social networks and how the complex intersections of race, class, nationality and gender shape network composition. Furthermore the research linked co-ethnic social networks to occupational mobility within the long-term care industry. This study advanced feminist theory by integrating a Black Feminist approach to intersectionality with geographic concepts of mobility, space and place to develop a new methodological tool, the Social Relations Chart. This provides a new way to examine intersectionality in practice. Finally, this study advanced feminist geographic inquiry by documenting the complex intersections and operation of the power hierarchies of race, nationality, class and gender in the workplace in a manner not previously documented in the urban labor market literature. In sum, this research brings these bodies of scholarship together and extends collective knowledge about the mechanisms by which mobility, power, place and space are shaped by multiscalar social relations. / Geography

HIV/AIDS studies mostly lack distinction between the US-born Blacks and non-US-born Blacks while African Americans (AAs) continues to represent the group with the heaviest burden of AIDS deaths and new diagnosis of HIV. A review of studies on HIV infection in the US, Europe, and other Western countries revealed a knowledge gap on HIV infection with non-refugee African immigrants (NRAIs), especially the Nigerian African Immigrants (NAIs) who are non-US-born Blacks. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study is to address this gap by exploring the expressed views of NAIs, a sub-group of the NRAIs living in Houston, Texas, on the issue of HIV infection. In a qualitative research design, 13 NAI individuals aged 18 to 49 were purposively selected for a face-to-face interview. The health belief model provided the conceptual framework for the development of study questions and analysis of the gathered data using the phenomenological approach. The study findings showed that 90% of the participants have knowledge of HIV infection. Even though 100% of the participants acknowledged the severity of unprotected sex and multiple sexual relationships in the acquisition of HIV, 27% engaged in multiple sexual relationships and there was inconsistent use of condoms in 64% of the participants. The participants expressed low levels of perception regarding the threat of contracting HIV in their relationships. Evidence of sexual mixing was found in about 61% of the study participants. This study provided an opportunity for future research with NAIs, an upcoming set of immigrants, in the US. The study also highlighted how knowledge of the NAIs' culture and language can be used in promoting preventative interventions like the use of condoms and HIV testing.