United States Immigration Bills: The Effect of Immigration Bills on African Immigrants

Abstract

Immigration has been a hot-button topic for the United States since almost the founding of the country. There seemed to be a huge increase in African immigrants in the United States since the late 1900s. Looking at this phenomenon is interesting because what could the catalyst be for this increase? Previous research has examined immigration bills and the effects these bills have had on immigration. One limitation of such previous research is that many focus only on one or two bills and their effects. This limited approach gives minimal context to the holistic nature of immigration. In contrast, this thesis takes a comprehensive look at immigration bills in the 1900s, and how such bills have influenced the number of African immigrants in the United States. Looking across multiple laws over a century as such allows for a fuller portrait of U.S. African immigration, and provides a fuller picture of the effects of bills on immigration. The central proposition of the thesis is that immigration bills affect the flow of immigrants in unique and uneven ways that require the type of comprehensive analysis provided in this thesis. The data source that is used for this study is the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, and the specific data used covered the period of 1911-2022. The thesis uses three approaches to estimate the impacts of immigration laws on African immigrants. One approach focuses on the type of African country from which immigrants are coming (the top ten African countries from 1999 through 2022 in the new millennium). The second approach focuses on the immigration categories of immigrants, e.g., family-based or employment-based. The third focuses on how immigration bills have affected the size of the immigrant population, using a one-way ANOVA test. First, analysis show that between 1999 and 2022, a limited number of countries consistently act as sending countries. For example, Nigeria and Ethiopia are shown to have the highest and most consistent number of immigrants coming into the United States between 1999 and 2022. West African countries were the most represented in the data examined, while Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt were the top 3 countries consistently. Another interesting finding is that every top sending country takes a dip in their immigration numbers in the year 2012. This type of decline is also shown to have occurred in 2020, when the immigration numbers of all countries plummeted below 10,000. Family-based immigration was the largest immigrant category, while employment-based immigration was the lowest. Finally, results of one-way ANOVA analysis show that most of the bills examined here have had some type of effect on the size of the African immigrant population in the U.S.