Giving Compass' Take:

• Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova provide an overview of the demographics of the more than 2 million sub-Saharan African immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018. 

• How can funders best ensure that immigrants successfully integrate into the communities they live in? 

• Read about South American immigrants in the U.S.

Slightly more than 2 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa lived in the United States in 2018. While this population remains small, representing just 4.5 percent of the country’s 44.7 million immigrants, it is a rapidly growing one. Between 2010 and 2018, the sub-Saharan African population increased by 52 percent, significantly outpacing the 12 percent growth rate for the overall foreign-born population during that same period.

There were very few sub-Saharan Africans in the United States just a few decades ago, with under 150,000 residents in 1980. Since then, immigrants from some of the largest sub-Saharan countries, such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Somalia, and South Africa, have settled in the United States. Overall, more than 2 million immigrants have come from the 51 countries that comprise sub-Saharan Africa, making up 84 percent of the 2.4 million immigrants from the entire African continent. The remainder are from the six countries of North Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia.

The diversity in origins for this population is mirrored by the diversity in reasons for coming to the United States, with the arrival of refugees from conflict-ridden countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); high-skilled immigrants and foreign students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa; Diversity Lottery visas recipients from countries such as Liberia and Cameroon; and, more recently, family members reuniting with immigrants already residing in the United States.

Eighty-one percent of all sub-Saharan Africans living in the United States as of 2018 had come from Eastern and Western Africa. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Somalia comprised the top five sending countries, accounting for 54 percent of all sub-Saharan Africans residing in the United States.

Read the full article about sub-Saharan African immigrants by Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova at Migration Policy Institute.