Younger West Indian immigrants are fairing better than their parents, with the women outperforming the males especially in the classroom, often showing the kind of discipline and focus that are hallmarks of their lives in the Caribbean.
At the same time, home-ownership is extraordinarily high among Jamaicans, Guyanese, Trinidadians, Barbadians, Antiguans, Vincentians and others from the English-speaking Caribbean. And while their incomes have not quite matched the earnings of white New Yorkers, they are close to achieving that benchmark.
But on the downside, like African Americans, Puerto Ricans and immigrants from the Dominican Republic, West Indians insist they suffer at the hands of the largely white New York City Police Department, whose officers stop and frisk them at will or otherwise harass them, even when there isn’t any indication of wrong-doing.
That mixed picture of the social and economic fortunes of second-generation West Indian immigrant children in the five boroughs was painted by two of the authors of a landmark study on the state of immigration as compared with native-born Americans, both white and black.
“It’s obviously a mixed picture and it is obviously complicated,” said Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center and one of the authors of the detailed $2 million study, “Inheriting the City: the Children of Immigrants Come of Age,” published this month by Harvard University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.
“West Indians are doing quite well in terms of educational outcomes,” Dr. Kasinitz pointed out. “In terms of incomes, they are doing substantially better than the average American and they are approaching the levels of the native whites who grew up in New York City. If you look at the whites who grew up in New York City as distinct from the whites who come to work on Wall Street and other places after college, very often from very elite colleges, to start careers on Wall Street and things like that, you find that West Indians are about caught up with native whites. So, West Indians are still substantially behind the native white population because there are all of these post collegiate influences.”
Dr. Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University in Massachusetts, agreed. “The second-generation West Indians, the young adults, ages 18 to 32, we looked at how different they did in terms of education and occupations and how they were integrating into American society,” Dr. Waters explained. “In general, the children were showing a lot of progress, compared to their parents. They were more highly educated than their parents and they were moving into occupations that were similar to other New Yorkers their age.
“In a lot of ways they were doing well, compared to African Americans. They were doing much better in terms of their educational outcomes,” she pointed out. “They had not yet caught up with native-born whites. But when you control for parents’ education, they actually were doing quite well, as well as native whites who grew up in New York City, unlike African-Americans and Puerto Ricans who are doing worse than you would expect, controlling for their parent’s background. For the West Indians, education is very important and so is home ownership. Of the groups we studied, West Indians are in the middle. The whites and the Chinese are at the top, while the Hispanic groups, the Dominicans and the Puerto Ricans are at the bottom.”
Both Dr. Kasinitz and Dr. Waters have written extensively on West Indian immigrants in the City, both publishing books on people from the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular.
The other author of the study and a book which was based on the research was Dr. John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the CUNY graduate Center in Manhattan.
“There is a deep commitment to education which reflects the influence of their parents and the realization that the higher paying jobs require an education, beginning with a high school diploma and later going onto college,” Dr. Waters told the Carib News. “But there is deep sense of high discrimination at the hands of the police.”
The authors looked at five immigrant groups – Russian Jews, South Americans, Chinese, Dominicans (Dominican Republic) and West Indians. The researchers then compared their lives with those of native born whites, African Americans and Puerto Ricans who have made New York City their home.
The results of the study were based on telephone interviews with 3,415 persons, between 1998 and 2000. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 333 persons in 2000 and 2001 and a final round of 172 interviews was conducted in 2002 and 2003.
In separate interviews with the Carib News, both Kasinitz and Waters attributed the “relative success” of West Indians to their parents; their status as immigrants in the City; a firm commitment to education; a higher than average number of wage and income earners in the household; and a decision by many young people to stay in their parents’ home for a much longer period than the average New Yorker, whether white or Black.
“All immigrants are the children of some level of remarkable parents,” said Kasinitz. “There is a great deal of self selection on the part of parents. They got up and left places and are probably more ambitious than the people they left behind. They were certainly more driven to achieve something for their kids and their parents were reasonably well educated compared to a lot of other groups. Don’t forget we are talking about adult children whose parents come to the United States. We are really talking about the kids of people who immigrated in the 1970s, ‘80s and early part of the ‘90s. That was really the beginning of the mass West Indian migration.”
The push by West Indians for upward economic and social mobility in a foreign land could be traced, the sociologists said, to the parents who wanted a better life for their offspring.
Interestingly, asserted Kasinitz, the second-generation West Indians were well-placed to and took advantage of the opportunities created by the Black community generally in the City in the 1990s.
“The opening of more opportunities for people of African descent, thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, thanks to the struggles led largely by African Americans really benefited people of color, in general, and West Indians were generally poised to take advantage of that,” Kasinitz said.
Compared with other immigrant groups, most of the West Indians spoke English, and the ability to handle the language effectively “certainly helped in a service sector economy, which puts a premium on language skills.” Then, there was the legendary tendency to buy real estate.
“Buying a house and living in your own house is not necessarily a huge advantage everywhere in the United States. But in New York in the 1970s and 1980s that was a big plus,” he pointed out. “If you bought a house in New York in the 1970s and ‘80s and you held onto it, you now have a pretty large asset. I almost don’t care where the house is. Really bad blocks in (Brooklyn’s) east have appreciated. For most of the people in the study, they made a wise investment in housing. That helps a lot for young people because it enables them to stay at home, in many cases for a while and getting an education.”
The significant number of educational institutions scattered throughout the City, especially CUNY colleges, “which allow a lot of second chances” for students who didn’t attend great high schools, enabled West Indians to thrive. As a matter of fact, CUNY may have been a linchpin for West Indians, allowing them to get the degrees and other forms of training they need to get ahead, according to the authors. “That, plus the fact that they also had the resources of parents who had housing for them” served as a springboard. “The children of immigrants, almost no matter where they come from, seem to be more at home with the idea of living at home in their parents’ home than Americans of any race. Whites, Blacks, even second-generation Puerto Ricans all seem to have that American attitude that living at home in your parents’ home, after about the age of 22 years old, is a mark of failure,” said Kasinitz. “It’s a failure to launch. You are not complete adult. But that’s not the case with immigrants.”
That’s a “huge advantage” in New York, where housing is at a premium, he said.
It also contributes to another feature of West Indian immigrant life: the relatively large number of working adults in Caribbean homes in the City. That fact pushes up the income level of West Indians, allowing them to compare favorably with the earning power of native whites.
But if those factors led to positive results, an overwhelmingly negative fact of life for Blacks from the Caribbean is racial discrimination, often at the hands of white police officers.
“Particularly among West Indians, there is a high-level of consciousness of racial discrimination,” Dr. Kasinitz reported. “If anything, it is higher than among the parents. There is a sense that perhaps not having a accent, not living as much within an ethnic community, having higher expectations of American society, many of the second-generation West Indians are very aware of and feel very strongly about having experienced racial discrimination, especially from the police. That remains a strong perception about the negatives of American society.”
In essence, West Indian young men, in particular, feel they were not being treated fairly in the country. And that is especially true when it comes to the criminal justice system, generally.
“In many cases, they think they are more aware of racial discrimination than their parents,” Kasinitz said.
The West Indians resent being “stopped and frisked” and the resentment was linked to the racially-tinged motivation of the police. “In part, it is because it is so purely racial,” said the CUNY sociologist.
Like Kasinitz, Dr. Waters said racial discrimination was a serious issue for West Indians.
“We also asked about experiencing racial discrimination, what kinds of problems they had and what was one cause for the worry,” she pointed out. “West Indians reported, actually, they had the highest rates of having experienced discrimination from the police, very comparable to African Americans and much higher than the other (immigrant) groups.”
