Africa Is Sending Us Its Best and Brightest

President Donald Trump decried that the U.S. was not taking in enough immigrants from Norway, and accepting too many arrivals from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, combined with some flowery language I would prefer not to reproduce. There has been a vociferous emotional reaction to his charges, but I would like to take a more sober tack and consider what the data actually tell us, focusing for now on Africa and Norway.

One of the most striking facts about immigration to the U.S., unbeknownst even to many immigration advocates, is the superior education of Africans coming to this country. If we consider adults age 25 or older, born in Africa and living in the U.S., 41.7 of them have a bachelor’s degree or more, according to 2009 data. For contrast, the native-born population has a bachelor’s degree or more at the much lower rate of only 28.1 percent in these estimates, and foreign-born adults as a whole have a college degree at the rate of 26.8 percent, both well below the African rate.

How about high school degrees? About one-third of immigrants overall lack this credential, but only 11.7 percent of African-born migrants don’t have a high school degree. That’s remarkably close to the rate for native-born Americans, estimated at 11.4 percent.

Or consider Nigerian-Americans, Nigeria being the most populous nation in Africa. Their education levels are among the very highest in the U.S., above those of Asians, with 17 percent of Nigerian migrants having a master’s degree.

In addition, about three-quarters of African migrants speak English, and they have higher than average rates of labor force participation. They are also much less likely to commit violent crimes than individuals born in the U.S.

That’s all good news of course, and it implies we could accept more African immigrants with mutual benefit. Subjectively, I would also note sub-Saharan Africa is the region where I encounter the least anti-American sentiment. That’s broadly consistent with these poll results.

As a resident of the Washington, D.C., area, I live alongside an especially high number and proportion of African immigrants. It is well known in this region that African immigration outcomes in terms of education, starting new businesses, safety, and assimilation are quite positive.

“They’re not sending us their best people” is a claim I hear from Trump in his speeches and news conferences. Yet that’s the opposite of the truth when it comes to Africa.

OK, so how about Norwegians? During America’s earlier age of mass migration, starting in the late 19th century, this country received many Norwegians. They were especially likely to come from low-skilled backgrounds, they had problems assimilating, and about 70 percent of them ended up returning to their home country. If we compare the sixteen immigrant groups from that time for which we have data, it is the Norwegians and Portuguese who did the worst in terms of wage gaps.

To be clear, I think this experiment with Norwegian migration has more than worked out all right, as Norwegian-Americans now have above average levels of income and have assimilated extremely well. But this is a cautionary tale, indicating that the groups you might think would succeed right away often face big struggles. Ole Edvart Rølvaag’s “Giants in the Earth,” the famous 1920s novel of Norwegian migration to the Dakotas in the 1870s, shows the enterprise was highly fraught and assimilation was a major issue. It is noteworthy that the novel was originally published in Norwegian, whereas the major Nigerian and Nigerian-American novels of today are typically written and first published in English.

It would be a mistake to look at these comparisons and conclude that somehow Africans are intrinsically superior to Norwegians. In fact, there is some pretty simple economic theory at work. The harder it is to get from one country to another, the more the immigration process selects for individuals who are especially ambitious and resourceful.

Economist Edward Lazear suggests a simple experiment. Consider immigrants to the U.S. from Algeria, Israel and Japan, and rank them in order of most educated to least educated. The correct answer is Algeria, Israel then Japan. Although that’s counterintuitive at first glance, it’s easy enough to see how it works. If you are Algerian and educated, or aspire to be educated, your prospects in Algeria are relatively poor and you may seek to leave. A talented, educated person in Japan or Israel can do just fine by staying at home. These kinds of considerations explain about 73 percent of the variation in the educational outcomes of migrants.

In other words, Trump is not only being offensive, he is also quite wrong.