How Many Black Immigrants? Ben Carson's Slave Comments Ignore Black Immigration

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson caused an uproar across social media Monday when he referred to slaves transported to the U.S. as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as "immigrants" during a presentation at HUD headquarters.

"That's what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less," Carson said. The comments were quickly mocked by many, including the NAACP and Samuel L. Jackson, for equating voluntary immigration with slavery.

But what was lost in Carson's comments, and the ensuing uproar, is the way that black and African immigration to the U.S. has drastically changed in the last few decades.

While most of the black population in the U.S. is descended from the estimated 10.7 million African slaves brought to the U.S. by slave traders between 1525 and 1866, a growing percentage of the U.S. black and immigrant population is made up of recent immigrants from Africa. The number of African immigrants living in the U.S. rose from 881,000 in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. Immigration from Africa grew 137 percent from 2000 to 2013.

But while African immigration has surged in the last decade-and-a-half, it's immigration from the Caribbean that makes up the largest percentage of black immigration. According to a 2016 report by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the black immigrant population grew from 800,000 in 1980 to 3.7 million in 2014 and now accounts for nearly 10 percent of the U.S. black population. Roughly half of all black immigrants are from the Caribbean.

In 2014, Jamaica contributed more black immigrants to the U.S. population than any other country. More than 665,000 Jamaicans immigrated to the U.S. in 2014, followed by nearly 600,000 Haitians. Nigeria was the third largest source of black immigration and the largest in Africa. More than 250,000 Nigerians immigrated to the U.S. in 2014, the Alliance said.