The best way to talk about who is
participating in the migration is to begin with the story of Kerry, a migrant
of Trinidadian descent in her late thirties. She was highly educated and middle
class, having a MBA degree and a job in finance at The Coca Cola Company. At
the time of our interview, she had been in Atlanta for 15 years, after moving
there in 1994 from New York, where she lived in a predominantly Caribbean
neighborhood in the Bronx. Like most migrants, she moved in search of better
socioeconomic opportunities and a greater quality of life. Before she moved to
Atlanta, she had been there many times to visit friends who were attending
school at the Atlanta University Center (which consists of the four historically
black colleges and universities Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College,
Spelman College, and Morehouse School of Medicine). From her visits, she fell
in love with Atlanta and began planning to move there. Although Kerry’s story
is not representative of all participating in the migration to Atlanta, she
shares several major characteristics with many of the Afro-Caribbeans in
Atlanta: age, education, socioeconomic class, and migration origin.
Women
have dominated the flow of Afro-Caribbean migrants to Atlanta. The majority of
Afro-Caribbeans that I spoke to were women, making up 63% of my respondents. According
to US Census data, women made up more than 50% of the Afro-Caribbean population
in Atlanta since the 1990s, when the migration surge began. The most recent
figures show that Afro-Caribbean women are 53.4% of the group’s population in
Atlanta, while men made up 46.6% (2008-2010 American Community Survey). This
characteristic fits with the female-dominated pattern of Caribbean immigration
flows to the US. As of the most recent decennial census, women made up 53.8% of
Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the US. “In virtually every year since 1967, West
Indian women in the legal stream to the United States have outnumbered men” (Foner
2009:8).
My
research suggests that young women dominate the flow of Afro-Caribbeans to
Atlanta. Almost 50% of the migrants in this study were in their 30s.[1]
The available figures show that Afro-Caribbean transplants to Atlanta are
primarily younger working-age adults and their children, with the median age
being 31.7 in 2010, and with the largest proportions between the ages of five
and seventeen (20.6%) and the ages of thirty-five and forty-four (18.6%). There
are relatively small proportions of those who are over the age of fifty-five
(7%) and fewer over the age of sixty-five (6.1%). These findings matter since
southern-bound black migration, especially of Afro-Caribbean immigrants moving
from New York and other northern cities, is generally associated as a movement
of a large number of retirement-age or retired migrants.[2]
In the case of Afro-Caribbeans in southern Florida, for example, the migration
surge to the region has been attributed to retirees, who by the 1980s were
moving there to take advantage of the warm (tropical) climate, proximity to the
Caribbean, and low cost of living, after living and working for many years in
northern cities (particularly New York), and who were later followed by younger
Afro-Caribbeans (Kasinitz, Battle, and Miyares 2001). Research on reverse
migration show that young black singles and families are driving the migration
to the South since the 1990s and suggest that the southward flow will continue
with young migrants even after all of the boomers have moved South and/or died
(Dodson and Diouf 2004; Falk, Hunt, and Hunt 2004).
[1]
48.5% of the Afro-Caribbean
migrants in this study were in their 30s.
[2]
This is particularly the picture
that the media paints of the black southern migration. Popular media sources,
for example New York Times, have published a number of stories in 2010 that
either started or focused heavily on the retired black returning “home” to the
South, after become weary of many years living in the harsh, cold North.
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