Jefferson's Migration Story--An Afro-Caribbean migrant in Atlanta

Jefferson’s migration story is typical of many Caribbean immigrants in the United States. By 2010, Jefferson had lived in the United States for 32 years. When he was 24 years old, he left his home on the small Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica and immigrated to New York City in 1978. He lived there for about for two months and moved to Boston, where he attended college for four years. In 1982, after he received his bachelor’s degree, he moved again to Connecticut to attend law school. Jefferson lived in Connecticut with his wife and children for seven years before he moved out of the Northeast to a new destination in the US. In 1989, a year after his wife went down to visit friends and fell in love with the city, Jefferson did some research, found a job with the Social Security Administration as a staff attorney, and moved his family to Atlanta, Georgia. In many ways, Jefferson’s story is typical of an Afro-Caribbean immigrant in the US. He emigrated from his small Caribbean island homeland to a major city along the American East coast, with a large concentration of Caribbean immigrants, looking for better socioeconomic opportunities and standard of living. He lived in a traditional Caribbean immigrant destination for a number of years (i.e., over a decade) before moving to a new city. What’s atypical about his migration story is its ending in Atlanta.

At the turn of the 21^st century, new trends in Caribbean immigrant settlement patterns have emerged, transforming communities across the United States. Prior to the 1990s, Caribbean immigrant settlement had a predictable pattern and was limited to a select few cities along the East coast, including metro New York, Miami, and Boston. By the century's end, immigrants were increasingly settling outside well-established immigrant gateways in a new group of cities and suburbs. Unlike their previous destinations, Atlanta has little history or identity with immigration prior to 1990. As Afro-Caribbean immigrants spread out from traditional immigrant destinations to new destinations across the United States, the importance of place in the immigrant experience has increasingly come to the fore.

How unique is Atlanta as a Caribbean immigrant destination? How—and in what ways—is the new migration to Atlanta distinctive in the Caribbean migration experience and history?