By: Christiana Best-Giacomini, Ph.D.
July 21, 2026
For many Americans, the image of an immigrant is almost automatic. They picture someone from Latin America or Asia. When they think about Black people in the United States, they typically think of African Americans. Rarely do they think about Black immigrants.
That blind spot matters.
More than 5.6 million Black immigrants now call the United States home, accounting for roughly one in every eleven immigrants. Our community includes people from Caribbean nations, as well as countries throughout Africa, Central America, and South America. We speak different languages, practice different religions, and bring with us diverse migration histories shaped by colonialism, political instability, economic opportunity, education, family reunification, and, increasingly, climate change. Yet despite this rich diversity, our experiences remain largely absent from public conversations about immigration.
This invisibility has real consequences. Policies are often developed without recognizing the unique experiences of Black immigrants or the ways race shapes our lives before and after migration. Public debates tend to treat immigrants as if they are a single, homogeneous population, overlooking the distinct challenges and strengths that exist within different immigrant communities.
Many Black immigrants arrive with significant educational credentials, professional experience, and a deep commitment to supporting their families and strengthening their communities. Nearly one-third hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, and almost two-thirds have become naturalized U.S. citizens. We contribute as nurses, physicians, educators, entrepreneurs, engineers, social workers, home health aides, hospitality workers, agricultural workers, transportation workers, construction workers, attorneys, scientists, business owners, military personnel, artists, and public servants. We serve in hospitals, schools, universities, hospitality, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses across the country. Our labor sustains neighborhoods, our entrepreneurship strengthens local economies, and our cultures enrich the social fabric of American life.
Immigrants from several African nations, in fact, are among the most highly educated immigrant populations in the United States. Their educational attainment challenges persistent stereotypes that portray immigrants primarily through the lens of economic need rather than human capital, innovation, and leadership.
Yet despite these contributions, Black immigrants occupy a troubling paradox. We are often invisible when immigration policy is debated but highly visible when immigration laws are enforced.
When Race and Immigration Collide
All immigrants experience xenophobia to varying degrees. Throughout American history, newcomers have encountered suspicion, discrimination, and exclusion. But the experiences of Black immigrants cannot be understood through immigration alone. They must also be understood through the lens of race.
Unlike many other immigrant groups, Black immigrants navigate two powerful systems simultaneously: anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Black racism. Long before an immigration officer reviews legal status, Black immigrants are frequently perceived first through racial stereotypes that shape encounters with employers, educators, landlords, healthcare providers, and law enforcement. Immigration status may influence legal outcomes, but race often shapes the initial interaction.
This intersection of race and immigration has significant consequences within the immigration system itself.
Although Black immigrants represent a relatively small share of the nation’s noncitizen population, they are disproportionately represented among immigrants facing detention and deportation on criminal grounds. Research has consistently found that Black immigrants are more likely to experience prolonged detention, solitary confinement, excessive use of force, and other forms of abuse while in immigration detention.
These disparities do not exist because Black immigrants commit more crimes. Rather, they reflect the ways racial inequities within the criminal legal system become intertwined with immigration enforcement. Racial profiling, over-policing in predominantly Black communities, disparities in arrests and charging practices, and increased surveillance all increase the likelihood that Black immigrants will come into contact with immigration authorities.
For some, a routine traffic stop becomes the beginning of an immigration case. For others, an arrest that never results in a conviction, or information shared between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, sets into motion a chain of events that can ultimately lead to detention, prolonged incarceration, family separation, or deportation.
It is important to remember that unauthorized presence in the United States is generally a matter of federal civil immigration law, not criminal law. Yet public discourse and enforcement practices often blur that distinction, creating the false impression that immigration violations are inherently criminal. This framing contributes to the stigmatization and criminalization of immigrant communities, particularly Black immigrants.
Scholars and advocates describe this phenomenon as the criminalization of Black immigrants, the process through which race and immigration status intersect to create heightened vulnerability within systems of policing, criminal justice, and immigration enforcement. It is not simply immigration status that places Black immigrants at risk. It is the interaction between structural racism and immigration policy that produces unequal outcomes.
The criminalization of Black immigrants did not emerge in isolation. It exists within a much longer history of the criminalization of Black people in the United States. For generations, African Americans have sounded the alarm about racial profiling, over-policing, mass incarceration, sentencing disparities, and the unequal treatment of Black people within the criminal legal system. These concerns are well documented and remain central to ongoing struggles for racial justice.
Black immigrants enter this existing racial landscape upon arrival. Regardless of nationality, accent, or immigration status, they are often perceived first as Black criminals, which has its roots in slave patrols in America. As a result, they can become subject to many of the same racial stereotypes and policing practices that have disproportionately affected foundational Black Americans for centuries. Immigration status does not replace race; rather, it compounds it.
When racial disparities in policing intersect with immigration enforcement, Black immigrants face an additional layer of vulnerability. A traffic stop, an arrest that never results in a conviction, or contact with law enforcement can have immigration consequences that extend beyond the criminal legal system, including prolonged detention, family separation, or deportation. In this way, the criminalization of Black immigrants reflects the convergence of two systems: the historical criminalization of Blackness in America and the contemporary criminalization of immigration.
Recognizing this connection is essential. The experiences of Black immigrants and foundational Black Americans are not identical, but they are deeply intertwined. Both communities are affected by structural racism, even as Black immigrants must also navigate the unique consequences of immigration law. Understanding these intersecting realities creates opportunities for greater solidarity in the pursuit of racial justice, immigrant justice, and human rights.
A Shared Vulnerability
For Caribbean communities, this reality should concern all of us, not only Haitians. Regardless of where we come from, we share a common vulnerability. Policies that target one Black immigrant community today can quickly become policies that affect another tomorrow.
The termination of TPS for Haitians, therefore, is not simply a Haitian issue. It is a Caribbean issue. It is a Black immigrant issue. And ultimately, it is a human rights issue.
When one segment of our community is dehumanized, excluded, or disproportionately subjected to discrimination, misinformation, detention and deportation, the effects ripple across all Black immigrant communities. Silence creates vulnerability; solidarity creates protection.
If America is serious about becoming a nation that lives up to its democratic ideals, Black immigrants can no longer remain invisible. Our stories, our contributions, and our experiences deserve to be recognized, not as an afterthought to the immigration conversation, but as an essential part of the American story itself.
(Dr Christiana Best is an Associate Professor at the University of Saint Joseph, Connecticut)
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