Immigrants today make up 14 percent of the U.S. workforce (Closing the Immigrant Skills Gap, n.d.), and, of these, a good proportion have arrived from Africa. Although Africans started coming to United States predominantly as students after the 1960s post-colonial era, their numbers have dramatically increased since the beginning of the 1990s. The influx of African immigrants to the United States in the last two decades especially after the end of the Cold War era of the early 1990s has been phenomenal. According to figures from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS-now the Office of Homeland Security), the number of African immigrants to the United States has more than quadrupled in the last two decades, from 109,733 between 1961 and 1980 to 531,832 between 1981 and 2000 (Takougang, n.d.). © 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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