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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

That's overly optimistic about America's capacity to induce immigration from Africa.

Most of Sub-Saharan Africa was Francophone, and that's represented in African immigration data as well. The US might be able to attract some amount of brain drain from Nigeria, but it's much less likely given the changes in immigration policy in the US over the past 10 years. A Nigerian who may have been brought on an H1B will now most likely be brought by an employer to Canada or the UK, or a GCC will be formed within Nigeria.

Furthermore, the question is what do you define as "African". Africa is a massive and diverse continent with various different countries with varying levels of state and human capital capacity. The kind of immigrant coming from Nigeria will be significantly different from similarly sized DRC.

Also, as a 1.5 gen immigrant (I immigrated as a toddler), it's easier to immigrate to much of Western Europe and the UK compared to the US.

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As someone who walked down 116th Street in Manhattan yesterday, I can assure you there is a large and healthy immigrant population here coming from Africa

(though I do not mean to downplay the current brakes that are being placed on immigration. In fact just yesterday that same community was targeted most likely on Canal Street where they did a raid. But these types of immigration brakes are always temporary)

I believe alephnerd lived in the Bay Area.

Yep! But you aren't seeing African immigration to the same degree in the rest of the US, let alone compared to what you see in much of Western Europe like the UK or France.

Also, much of the African immigrant community you see in NYC is primarily Senegalese in origin (there's a reason why 116th St in Harlem is Petit Sénégal), and most Senegalese immigrate to France.

There are only around 20k Senegalese Americans (most of whom live in the NYC area) versus 300k French Senegalese. And that's just Senegal alone.

I'd say there are probably more Nigerian restaurants than Segalase at this point so I'm not sure

Even then, on a per capita basis, the UK is the primary destination for Nigerians (especially for education), not the US - and that community is much more established than the comparable community in the US.

NYC is not representative of the US, and you don't see the same degree of immigration of Africans in the US aside from isolate communities such as Somalis in Minnesota, Tigrayans in the DMV, or Igbos in tech hubs and TX.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerians there are more Nigerians in the US than UK. That's purely a count rather than a percent of the population of course. But I certainly agree that the US has immigrant communities generally in big cities and not everywhere. Has always been that way

Manhattan is not America. NYC is the outlier by probably any metric.

I see a lot of Africans where I live too, but, and I don’t mean this offensively, I’m not sure how or why they’re here. In most of my interactions with them, they’re Uber drivers. Maybe they’re relatives of someone immigrating on some visa or something.

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