Black Immigrant Population in US Could More Than Double by 2060

About 4.6 million Black people in the U.S. — roughly 1 in 10 — are immigrants, and that figure could more than double to 9.5 million by 2060, according to a study by Pew Research Center.

Pew based its calculations in the study, released Thursday, on Census data collected from 2006 to 2019 through community surveys.

“The nation’s immigrant population has been, to some extent, largely driven by trends from Latin America and Asia,” said Mark Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research for Pew and a coauthor of the study. “But African and particularly Black immigrant trends have become a growing part of the story of the nation’s immigrant population overall.”

Lopez noted that in addition to the roughly 10% of Black immigrants, an additional 9% of Black people are second-generation and have at least one foreign-born parent, meaning “the immigrant experience is not far from the daily life experiences of about 1 in 5 Black Americans today.”

In 2019, New York (about 900,000) and Florida (about 800,000) had the most Black immigrants, according to the study.

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Most Black immigrants, the study showed, came from Jamaica (about 760,000) and Haiti (about 700,000) from 2000 to 2019, and many of them, Paulos noted, also faced comparatively more difficult acclimation periods, including more discrimination, than some from other nations.

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