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Ethnic Attrition in the Nigerian American Second Generation

Tue, August 15, 12:30 to 1:30pm, Palais des congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 517B

Abstract

Prevailing theories of immigrant adaptation hold that with the passage of time and generations, immigrant identities shift away from countries and ethnicities of origin and toward identities that reflect their destinations. Many European immigrants of the 20th century traded their specific national origins for “American” or “White” or “Euro-American” identities. Such identificational shifts have been associated with upward mobility even for some non-European groups including Mexican Americans. But it is not clear that this is path has been available to Nigerian immigrants. They may not be able to trade their Nigerian identities for “American” and certainly not “White” identities. When they cease to be Nigerian, they are likely to become Black or African-American in the eyes of others and perhaps in their own eyes. In this paper, I use U.S. Census and American Community Survey to trace patterns of identity in a Nigerian second generation cohort across a 25 year period (1990 to 2014) as they advance from early school-age to adulthood. The cohort shrinks inordinately across the period as its members cease to identify as Nigerian, and evidence suggests that those who are downwardly mobile are more likely to drop out of the Nigerian population leaving us with a positively selected Nigerian second generation and, perhaps, unduly optimistic assessments of intergenerational mobility among Nigerian Americans.

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