Black immigration is a rich source of US cultural pluralism; it evolved from racial slavery and discrimination.

Europeans imported more than 12 million African blacks to the Western Hemisphere as slaves ca. 1502–1888, with British North American colonies importing 6.45 percent of them. Congress made only whites eligible for citizenship in 1790 and, from 1865 to 1965, when it abolished “quotas based on national origin,” denied alien status to Africans.

African, Caribbean, and South American immigrants arrived in large numbers post-1965. Seeking asylum and jobs, they helped increase the foreign-born black population sevenfold between 1960 and 1980. Foreign-born blacks increased from 125,000 (1980) to 2,815,000 (2005), most immigrating after 1990. One-third originated in Africa and two-thirds in the Caribbean and Latin America. Ten countries, notably Nigeria and Ethiopia, accounted for 70 percent of black African immigrants. They tended to settle in densely populated cities such as Washington, DC and New York City. A majority of Caribbean blacks and Latinos came from Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and the Dominican Republic; two-thirds of their total number settled in the New York and Miami metropolitan areas. About a million black-immigrant Africans, plus 3 million West Indians and Latinos of African descent, live in the United States today.