Article by Indepth Africa at 2012-04-27 01:24:03
Categorized in Article, Pan Africa,
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Come and Go, Immigration Issues: “Nothing Human is Foreign to Us”
By: Alfresco Ruwe
According to the 2008–2012 American Community Survey (ACS), 39.8 million foreign-born people resided in the United States including 1.6 million from Africa. Of the 1.6 million Africans in the U.S, 36% were from West Africa, 29% from East Africa, 17% from North Africa, and 5% from Middle and Southern Africa. Before I ramble on about these stats, let me first apologize to readers in Europe, South America, Australia, and the Middle East. I realize Africans migrate to other places than just the U.S. Hopefully, our dialogues at Ezibota can interrogate certain privileges that we inherit as we move to different countries and what that means as we tackle various issues of race, laws, culture, and sexuality in relation to the African continent.
With that being said, the next obvious question is, “With such high numbers of migration, where is the discourse of immigration in our communities?” Whether our responses are couched in a fear of brain drain (the emigration of highly trained or intelligent people from a particular country) or for voluntary reasons such as seeking a “better life,” how do we as Africans come to understand ourselves in the global context of nation-states and better answer the question of citizenship as we migrate to different countries?
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