The United States, a nation of immigrants, yet one with a pattern of inhibiting people of color from immigrating, has continually demonstrated its complicated relationship with newcomers. Immigration maneuvers and policies in the past did not explicitly target African immigrants, post-slavery, because there weren't significant enough numbers of them seeking to come in. (One factor was the aforementioned anti-Asian efforts, which had a trickle-down effect on Africans.)
According to the Pew Research Center, the sub-Saharan African population in the U.S. went from 130,000 in 1980 to 1,716,000 in 2015. Though that number makes up only 4 percent of the 43.3 million immigrants in the United States, it's notable enough to garner attention from the government.
On Jan. 11, 2018, President Donald Trump said during a White House meeting with senators: "Why do we want people from all these sh*thole countries here?" He was referring to people from African countries, as well as from El Salvador and Haiti.
His statement sparked outrage from people across the globe, particularly those from the countries he targeted by name. To add insult to injury, according to a White House official quoted in the Washington Post, the president suggested that he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt they would help the U.S. financially.
“Trump seems unable to recognize foreign-born people, particularly black and brown people, as American, regardless of residency or citizenship. He understands whiteness as a necessary feature of American identity,” commentator Carly Goodman wrote in The Hill. "... This is a disturbing echo of our country’s history of using racist criteria to determine immigration policy."
Trump’s comments were aimed at his desire to end the visa lottery program, originally intended to diversify the immigration applicant pool from underrepresented countries. The question many Africans found themselves asking: “What type of immigrant applicant pool?”
Despite the hostility from the president and others against African countries, Nigerians continue to emigrate in droves. They make up the largest percentage of black immigrants to the U.S. who are not from the Caribbean.
In fact, Nigeria was removed from the eligible visa lottery program because, as former U.S. Consul General Jeffrey Hawkins explained, "Nigerians have graduated from being underrepresented to being a fully represented group in the U.S. … Therefore, there is no longer a need to encourage Nigerians to apply to travel to the U.S. through the program."
Remi Adekoya, a Polish-Nigerian political commentator and journalist, said this large migration wave arises from a stark but simple fact: Nigerians don't have options back home.
"For people back home, things are rough,” Adekoya said. “They're going to try and get to the U.S. whether Trump is president, or whether it's a Ku Klux Klan guy who becomes president tomorrow. … Because if things are not going well for you where you are, and you have an opportunity, even a sliver of opportunity to go to a country where things might be better for you, you're not going to worry that, 'Oh, the president might not like people like me.'"
Adekoya said he wasn't surprised by the president’s comments: "I'd be surprised if anyone is surprised he thinks like that. A lot of Americans think like that. A lot of people around the world think like that. Unfortunately, what it really boils down to, at the end of the day, is that nations who are not successful and prosperous are not respected."
Nigeria has some of Africa's best natural resources, a strong economy and a sizable population, so why is it not prosperous? John Campbell, the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria from 2004 to 2007, noted several reasons.
"First, its sense of national identity is quite weak," he said, meaning that being Nigerian is the last thing on residents’ list of ways to identify themselves. The first is their family identity and ethnicity.
"Secondly,” Campbell said, referring to the country’s complicated colonial history, “Nigeria has 350-something-odd ethnic groups that were cobbled together by the British, essentially for administrative ruling purposes."
Campbell believes that much of Nigeria’s weakness comes from ineffective political leadership that dates back to that colonial period. He also cites the country's large economic divide.
"So here you have a country with enormous natural resources, huge oil income, in which more than half the population lives on under $2 a day, while a tiny percentage of the population can invest in apartments that cost $50 million in New York,” he said.
Adekoya also cites class disparity as a result of poor leadership over a span of decades: "Corruption is obviously a huge problem we have here in Nigeria, and it's been this way since our independence in 1960."
Nigeria's Downfall
For longtime watchers of Africa, including millions of Nigerians themselves, the question might be: When was Nigeria not rife with economic and political corruption?
Those who have lived through all of Nigeria's tumult say it was when they were still under British rule. Adekoya, who is currently conducting research on this topic, said Nigerians got into this economic quagmire because "we never started well in the first place."
Those who have lived through all of Nigeria's tumult say it was when they were still under British rule. Adekoya, who is currently conducting research on this topic, said Nigerians got into this economic quagmire because "we never started well in the first place."
"The most productive years in Nigeria were somewhere between 1950 and 1960,” he said. “Now this was the last decade of colonialism. So this was the period where the British had introduced step-by-step elections."
During this time, Nigerians were in control politically, but the British still had control over the military. This means that politicians were the face and brains of Nigeria but not the hands. At that time, Nigeria was mostly functioning as a well-oiled machine. It had a leading agricultural industry (and was West Africa's leading exporter), a strong manufacturing industry and advanced infrastructure for the time. After Nigeria gained independence in 1960, the politicians acquired full control, including over the military — and that's what quickly led to the country's descent, Adekoya and other students of that history say.
"This is when violence came into politics," Adekoya said, referring to the abuse of power that eventually led to a 1966 military coup and the civil war from 1967 to 1970. This war resulted in the loss of 1 million civilian lives. "There wasn't large-scale violence in politics. From the moment of independence, violence came into politics, and obviously descended downhill from there.
With the violence and corruption within the political system came the stagnation of economic growth. Oil, the one thing that Nigeria had come to rely upon to fuel the economy, eventually became the thing that also halted its progression.
Nigeria's Oil Economy and the Golden Era
Crude oil is one of Nigeria's most abundant natural resources and profitable economic exports. The country benefited from a surge in oil prices in the 1970s and joined the influential OPEC cartel in 1971. Adekoya called this period "the golden era."
"There was an oil boom,” he said. “So basically, that was the period where Nigerians were selling loads of oil, oil prices were high, cash was just flowing into the country."
He referred to it as "easy money" and said Nigerians began to rest on their laurels.
"For them they've gotten used to oil money. … They don't do anything,” Adekoya said. “All you do is: Some white folks from Chevron or Shell come to your country, they bring their equipment with them, they drill for the oil, they take the oil, and as a country, you get a cut of the money."
Flush with oil money, Nigerian leaders declined to develop other natural resources and invest in educating their constituents and the future of the growing nation.
Even in that golden era of the ’70s, Adekoya said, the opportunities coming directly from the oil economy benefited only a small percentage of the population. The rest remained deeply impoverished. But on the outside, the situation looked good.
Odiase, today practicing in Los Angeles, recalls those years back home.
"I remember in '82, I was in what we call secondary school. That's high school,” he said. “I remember when you graduated from college, you were promised a Volkswagen Beetle and you would get that right away … and one naira used to equal one [U.S.] dollar."
The Decline
In the mid-'80s, the economy, already precariously built, took a turn for the worst. Because of the inconsistent nature of the market, a sharp decline in prices for crude oil led to economic instability for decades to come in Nigeria.
Campbell, the former ambassador, summed up the problem: "What underpins the country's fundamental economic decline is the oil curse — an economy based on oil becomes subject to massive fluctuations. … When oil was down, government expenditures were not, which meant that governments had to borrow. Which meant that massive debts increased. All that led to the economic malaise."
Citing a related factor, Adekoya said, "So on the one hand, we have oil cash flowing into the country — I mean like billions. And on the other hand, there was a shortage of educated personnel."
Because Nigeria was being led by people who were generally uneducated and had gained their positions through corrupt means, he said, the well-being of the people was never taken closely into consideration.
Not only was the future of Nigeria tenuous, but the population continued to multiply without signs of slowing. The population grew by 50 million between 2005 and 2015, to about 190 million. The United Nations projects that Nigeria will become the third-most-populous country by 2050, rocketing well past 300 million people, surpassing the U.S. and trailing only India and China.
The exploding population has meant more people living in poverty. In 1985, it was estimated that 46 percent of Nigerians, or 34 million, were impoverished. In 2010, roughly 69 percent of Nigerians, or 112 million, lived in poverty, a massive jump.
The sudden economic troubles, combined with a population that was expanding exponentially, caused the emerging Nigerian middle class from the late 1970s and early ’80s to dissipate. Employee wages went unpaid for months, making it impossible for professionals to make ends meet, forcing many into poverty. The Nigerian currency rapidly devalued, and the only way out for those who had the means was to emigrate to the United States, the United Kingdom or Chad. (One measure of that flow of people: Today those countries are listed by the Migration Policy Institute as sending the highest level of remittance back to Nigeria.)
Realistically speaking, only the upper class — or educated elite, as Adekoya put it — were able to successfully do so. Despite the fact that the Nigerian diaspora fares so well in the United States, that success is not reflected in Nigeria, where 45 percent, roughly 85 million people, are illiterate.
The Most Educated Ethnic Group in America
President Trump’s suggesting that more people from countries like Norway should immigrate to the States, rather than from countries like Nigeria and other "sh*tholes," misses a key fact about Nigerians: They are the most educated group in America, including native-born Americans, and more educated than Norwegians, too.
Campbell explained that assimilation into the American education system for Nigerians is easier because English is one of the official languages of their home country, thus eliminating an extra hurdle before attending school.
Adekoya said that Nigerians who have emigrated to the United States or the United Kingdom to study are either among the educated elite or children of the educated elite.
"It's not easy,” he said. “A poor Nigerian can't just wake up in the morning and say they want to look for a visa or apply for a lottery and go to America. They won't even think of it."
From the moment the Nigerian economy noticeably began to tank in the early '80s, affluent, educated Nigerians began leaving in droves. Adekoya said it became commonly known as the "brain drain," wherein educated people were emigrating and leaving all the uneducated, poor people behind.
What Now?
So where does this leave the fate of Nigerians and would-be Nigerian-Americans? There is no definitive answer, but it appears grim for many. Unemployment is still a colossal issue, government officials are still using the police and military in corrupt ways, and leaders are still unwilling to invest in educating the masses and developing industries other than oil.
This continued pattern of neglect from the Nigerian government is why both Adekoya and Campbell predict that no matter what Trump, or any other world leader, has to say about immigrants or Nigerians in particular, it won't stop Nigerians from wanting to come to the United States for a better economic outlook.
"Unfortunately,” Adekoya said, “people in Nigeria and other African countries don't have the luxury to be picky about where they might go to better their lives because there's a nasty guy in charge there [in the States]."
Whatever the next chapter may hold for Nigerians who aspire to move to the U.S., an imminent event may help shape it.
Trump will be meeting with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday, April 30. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "President Trump looks forward to discussing ways to enhance our strategic partnership and advance our shared priorities."
