Immigration continues to be a hot-button issue causing debates spanning all over the globe. The argument being made for halting emigration from certain countries include an increase in violence assumed to perpetrated by undocumented persons, low education levels of immigrants and the notion that those who are emigrating from other nations do not assimilate well into American culture.
However, if the U.S. economy is to stay afloat, Ghanaians are amongst some of the best groups to contribute to that cause. According to Bloomberg Opinion, “immigrants from Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are near the top in both employment-population ratio and higher-education enrollment.”
Accordingly, Ghana topped the list of hardest working people in the U.S. with 75.2 percent followed by Kenya (3rd), Ethiopia (4th), Nigeria (8th) and Liberia (9th).
Bloomberg
The aforementioned is pertinent to discuss because Africans, in particular, are thought to be barbaric, uneducated and non-essential members of American society that come from shit holes. Clearly, this isn’t so.
Delving deeper, according to a report on the work and job skill among immigrant groups in the U.S., Africans are generally more hardworking and highly skilled than immigrants from other parts of the world. Moreover, they are harder working than native Americans.
Bloomberg
The report also found that of the immigrant groups in U.S., Egyptians, Nigerians, and South Africans are among the most highly educated with more than half of their populations over the age of 25 having at least a bachelor’s degree.
The report was produced by Justin Fox, a renowned American financial journalist, for Bloomberg. Fox used the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2016 to produce his report in response to recent arguments by White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly. Kelly notably said the following about undocumented immigrants:
They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth, fifth, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English, obviously, that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English. They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws.
Fox believes that the argument about the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is overblown and misguided. With 70% of all undocumented immigrants coming from mostly Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, many foreign-born people in the states are documented immigrants. Moreover, this group, Fox says, are highly skilled, hardworking, English-speaking, and ready to integrate into the United States’ “modern society”.
As Fox advises, “Want Educated Immigrants? Let In More Africans. Highly skilled? Check. Hardworking? Check. English-speaking? Check. Ready to integrate? Check.”
