A small number of the Afro-Caribbeans migrants I interviewed
told me that they were recruited or invited to move to Atlanta; and, among
them, all reported being recruited by a family member with whom they resided
after migrating there. Beulah, a sixty-year old Jamaican-born migrant who moved
to Atlanta in 1998 after living in Australia for a few years, was invited to
move by her daughter who had moved to the city from New York. Similarly,
Sheena, a migrant from Montserrat in her early thirties, immigrated directly to
Atlanta as a teenager in 1992, after being invited by her sister. When I asked
her how she came to live in Atlanta, she replied, “I came to Atlanta when I was
15…My sister and my brother moved here, after going to school at Purdue in Indiana…My
sister got an internship in Atlanta and she liked it here. Then my parents
bought a house there. I moved to Atlanta and finished high school here.” The
willingness of many of the earlier Afro-Caribbean migrants to move to Atlanta
without the support of a network in place there supports the idea that there is
something distinctive about Atlanta drawing them there. In her study of West
Indian nannies in Brooklyn, sociologist Tamara Mose Brown (2011) found that
many of the women chose to migrate to New York because they had family already
living there and with these connections found it easier to find jobs and to
adjust to their new lives in the US. They found it particularly easier to
settle in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, because these boroughs have distinct
Caribbean neighborhoods, with stores and businesses that are owned by
Afro-Caribbeans and sell goods that were also sold in their homelands.
Social networks play a major role in immigrants’ migration
and settlement patterns (Ho 1991; Bashi 2007; Olwig 2007). “For many migrants,
it is often through those networks that they obtain knowledge about possible
migration destinations, the social and economic opportunities that they offer,
and the best modes of access to these places” (Olwig 2007: 10). Through
networks, migrants exchange economic and social resources needed to survive in
their new environments. In the case of Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study,
their social networks in their previous home cities and in Atlanta greatly
aided their move to the new immigrant destination.
According to sociologist Vilna Bashi (2007), migration is
rooted in the decision-making of social networks, which include family, friends,
and compatriots. In her book Survival of
the Knitted, Bashi (2007) examines immigrant social networks and shows how
they function, using the case of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York and
London. She found many Afro-Caribbean immigrants moved to New York and London
because members of their immigrant network were already living there, that
first selected, or recruited, them for migration to the destination and then
facilitated their moving and resettling process. She describes immigrant
networks as consisting of two types of members: those immigrants who have helped
another migrant move and adapt to a new environment (“hubs”) and those who have
received assistance from another migrant in the migration process (“spokes”). The
hub is a central figure in the network because they possess social and economic
resources to facilitate the migration process, and choose potential migrants,
or spokes, who they believe possess character traits suitable for survival in
their new environment. Networks help Caribbean immigrant newcomers to adapt to
their new lives and homes, by helping them find jobs, find places to live, gain
US residency or evade detection if they are not in the country legally, and
other things that they need to settle into their new homes (Bashi 2007).
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