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Paradoxes of Immigrant Incorporation: Promises and Prohibitions of Income, Education, Perceived Discrimination, and Accent among Nigerians in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas (USA)

Dennis D. Cordell, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

This paper is a descriptive analysis and comparison of the segmented integration of Nigerian immigrants in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, or DFW.1 The essay is drawn from qualitative and quantitative data collected from a convenience sample of 100 households in the Nigerian community, supplemented by census data and field reports, all collected in the course of a recent National Science Foundation (USA) study. Little of the very large literature on immigration has yet explored the “new” African immigration to the United States (US), a phenomenon that dates from the late 1970s and 1980s.
The Nigerian community in DFW, like the Nigerian immigrant community nationally, is characterized by very levels of educational achievement, and quite high economic status. At the same time, Nigerian immigrants perceive that racial and ethnic discrimination and their accents are major obstacles to integration into American society. Focusing on the Nigerian community in DFW, this essay first describes levels of educational and economic achievement. It goes on to survey Nigerian perceptions of discrimination and the obstacle posed by the differently accented English of many in the community. To some degree, the results challenge the popular notion that “successful” immigrant incorporation is only a question of achieving high levels of income and education.
The paper concludes with comparisons between the Nigerian community in DFW and African immigrant communities elsewhere in the country, and with the experience of other immigrants from the African diaspora—notably the Caribbean—who arrived in the United States in the middle half of the twentieth century.
1. This essay is based largely on data collected as part of a research project entitled “Immigrants, Rights, and Incorporation in a Suburban Metropolis,” funded by a grant from the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation (BCS0003938). The principal investigators are Caroline Brettell, Dennis Cordell, Manuel Garcia y Griego, and James Hollifield. Results, opinions, and conclusions presented in this paper are those of it author alone.