There Can Be No American History Without Black History
This Black History Month, let's also remember to uplift and honor Black immigrants and demand policies that protect their lives, families, and futures.
This February, America’s Voice is proud to celebrate Black History Month, a time to honor the rich history and contributions of Black Americans – including Black immigrants who help our nation prosper.
“Until the 1960s, legal migration to the United States for Black immigrants was almost entirely impossible,” the Center for American Progress noted in 2023. “But today, Black immigrants are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the United States and represent an increasing share of the overall Black population in the country.” Today, more than four million Black immigrants call the U.S. their home, with most hailing from the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.
They are business owners, teachers, members of Congress, Hollywood actors, Olympians, and so much more. But above all they are treasured members of our communities who enrich our nation in a multitude of ways, including by contributing billions in taxes annually and playing essential roles in industries critical to millions of us, including healthcare.
“For example, Black immigrants are more likely to work in healthcare than are other immigrant groups,” the American Immigration Council said in 2023. “In 2021, a total of 719,000 Black immigrants worked in the healthcare and social assistance industry, representing 3.3% of the industry’s total workforce. Within healthcare occupations, 152,000 Black immigrants worked as home health and personal care aides, 130,000 as registered nurses, and 16,000 as physicians.” Among Haitian immigrants alone, more than 100,000 work as healthcare workers.
And as the U.S. continues to face a shortage in healthcare and other essential industries – the American Hospital Association projects a shortage of about 100,000 critical health care workers by 2028 – Black immigrants can be essential in bolstering this vital labor force. Black immigrants are also vital to domestic work, often said to be the work that makes all other work possible.
And, of course, there are the significant fiscal contributions that Black immigrants make to help sustain critical federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, and to our economy overall.
“In 2021, Black immigrant households generated a total income of $153 billion,” American Immigration Council continued. “They paid $39 billion in taxes: $24 billion in federal income taxes and $15 billion in state and local taxes. This left Black immigrant households with $114 billion in spending power—money households used to support American businesses, invest in housing, and more. As the Black immigrant population grows, so does their spending power—it increased by 7.1% from 2018 to 2021.”
So it makes absolutely no sense for the administration to now be fighting to make hundreds of thousands of these community members deportable, notably in seeking to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalia and Haiti despite conditions remaining dire in those countries according to the federal government’s own admission. In the case of the former, the State Department issued the highest level alert urging Americans to not travel to Somalia, citing “crime, terrorism, civil unrest, health, kidnapping, piracy, and lack of availability of routine consular services.”
Haiti also has a level four “Do Not Travel” alert from the State Department. “Haiti has been under a State of Emergency since March 2024,” said the State Department. “Crimes involving firearms are common in Haiti. They include robbery, carjackings, sexual assault, and kidnappings for ransom. Do not travel to Haiti for any reason.”
More than 350,000 Haitian neighbors who have been legally working and living here were just hours from facing potential mass deportation to these conditions until a federal judge stepped in, finding “merit in the claim that anti-Black and anti-Haitian animus prompted the homeland security secretary’s move to end humanitarian protections,” MS Now reported. The judge “cited how Trump has ‘repeatedly invoked racist tropes of national purity,’ as she found that the plaintiffs who sued the administration are likely to win their claim that ‘anti-black and anti-Haitian animus motivated Secretary Noem’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation.’”
Notably, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes “put a social media post of Noem’s on the first page of her opinion,” the report continued. That social media post referred to immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the report said. “WE DON’T WANT THEM,” Noem wrote. “NOT ONE.”
But according to July 2025 polling from Gallup, a record-high 79% of Americans said immigration was a “good” thing for the country. Since then, immigrant rights were top of mind for the millions of Americans who participated in the largest single-day protest in modern U.S. history, and since then have continued to fiercely condemn brutality at the hands of mass deportation agents. Among community members bravely standing up to these injustices are the very Somali neighbors targeted by the administration. They’ve responded not with fear but with courage, “from homemade sambusas for protesters to foot patrols on the lookout for ICE,” as The Intercept previously reported.
Abdi Rahman said this includes buying and delivering groceries for families unable to safely step outside their front doors. “When ICE started showing up in our neighborhoods, we realized we can’t fight the federal government. But we can come together and patrol the neighborhood, keep ICE out, deescalate,” he told The Intercept.
Many of these community members have been here before. Resiliency is a part of their DNA. “Mahmoud Hasan, a community activist whom everyone refers to as BBC, was in a refugee camp after fleeing civil strife in Somalia in the 1990s,” the report continued. “He earned his moniker because, living in the camp, he learned English strictly by watching the BBC and would practice by speaking like a news anchor. ‘We fled a civil war,’ Hasan said. ‘We are more resilient than they think.’”