The Briefing Room
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: RoosGirl on June 10, 2018, 03:58:02 am
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At an Onyejekwe family get-together, you can’t throw a stone without hitting someone with a master’s degree. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors — every family member is highly educated and professionally successful, and many have a lucrative side gig to boot. Parents and grandparents share stories of whose kid just won an academic honor, achieved an athletic title or performed in the school play. Aunts, uncles and cousins celebrate one another’s job promotions or the new nonprofit one of them just started. To the Ohio-based Onyejekwes, this level of achievement is normal. They’re Nigerian-American — it’s just what they do.
Today, 29 percent of Nigerian-Americans over the age of 25 hold a graduate degree, compared to 11 percent of the overall U.S. population, according to the Migrations Policy Institute. Among Nigerian-American professionals, 45 percent work in education services, the 2016 American Community Survey found, and many are professors at top universities. Nigerians are entering the medical field in the U.S. at an increased rate, leaving their home country to work in American hospitals, where they can earn more and work in better facilities. A growing number of Nigerian-Americans are becoming entrepreneurs and CEOs, building tech companies in the U.S. to help people back home.
It hasn’t been easy — the racist stereotypes are far from gone. Last year, President Donald Trump reportedly said in an Oval Office discussion that Nigerians would never go back to “their huts†once they saw America. But overt racism hasn’t stopped Nigerian-Americans from creating jobs, treating patients, teaching students and contributing to local communities in their new home, all while confidently emerging as one of the country’s most succesful immigrant communities, with a median household income of $62,351, compared to $57,617 nationally, as of 2015.
Continued - https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/meet-the-ethnic-group-redefining-immigrant-success-in-the-us/86885 (https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/meet-the-ethnic-group-redefining-immigrant-success-in-the-us/86885)
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I've worked with some Nigerians in the past. I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but they were smart, hard working, ethical people.
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I've worked with some Nigerians in the past. I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but they were smart, hard working, ethical people.
Me too, and they can't stand "African-Americans", they can't believe so many of them squander the opportunities they have just by being born in this country.
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I've worked with some Nigerians in the past. I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but they were smart, hard working, ethical people.
I had the same experience.
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Me too, and they can't stand "African-Americans", they can't believe so many of them squander the opportunities they have just by being born in this country.
There is a pecking order told to me by a fellow from Tobago many years ago. African at the top, Caribbean Blacks in the middle, American Blacks at the bottom. He (and this was in 1978) said that marrying a step down was like marrying down caste in India, marrying two steps down could get you disowned.
Not sure if that persists, but I thought it interesting.
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I've had the opportunity to actually work in Nigeria. When I got back home I told my boss that if that was all he had for me to do I no longer needed the job.
Never went back to Nigeria again.
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Really interesting. I would have guessed People from India.
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I've had the opportunity to actually work in Nigeria. When I got back home I told my boss that if that was all he had for me to do I no longer needed the job.
Never went back to Nigeria again.
Much as those of our ancestors who left Europe and other places, they were not the same as the people who stayed behind. They all left for a reason.
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Much as those of our ancestors who left Europe and other places, they were not the same as the people who stayed behind. They all left for a reason.
:amen: several in fact!
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A Nigerian Prince wanted to give me money one time.
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A Nigerian Prince wanted to give me money one time.
LOL! You and everyone else who's email address he could find!
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A Nigerian Prince wanted to give me money one time.
:silly: I don't want to know.