Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
The black population in Queens is fairly prosperous. Queens doesn't have a big AA population, and it tends to be Caribbean second-third generation civil servants. They're homeowners living in semi-suburban surroundings. City and transit jobs in NYC pay very well. I don't think CA has a West Indian population, anywhere.
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Black Californians seem to be much more domestic migrants (African Americans from the US South from the past generations) than immigrants. It seems like black immigrants seem to prefer the East coast (eg. NYC, Miami) over the West (maybe with the East Africans in Seattle an exception). Though California is a big immigration magnet still for many groups of Asians and Hispanics, Africans/Caribbeans don't choose it as much. Even places like Texas are known for African immigrants like Nigerians more than CA.
I wonder if that's just a geography thing (NYC and Miami on the East coast closer to the West Indies, Caribbean, even west Africa), while California traditionally had more Asians (east across the Pacific) and Hispanics (the Mexican connection south of the border).
For some reason, whites and blacks moving to California seem to be "rooted in other parts of the US" through domestic migration (eg. African Americans from the Great Migrations, Midwestern Protestants to LA), with few black or white immigrants (both recently and comparatively in the past few generations) relative to the East coast. I know California historically had many people with Irish pride, but from my perception (maybe I'm wrong) most white and black Californians seem like they don't identify with an ethnicity the way east coasters do (eg. "I'm Italian", "I'm Greek" for white Chicagoans or NY'ers, or "I'm Haitian", "Jamaican" etc. for black NY'ers).