Identity Dynamics in Diaspora Communities

"This dynamic country ‘America’ subjects its inhabitants to more abrupt changes during a lifetime or a generation than is normally the case with other great nations.”- Erik Erikson

The percentage of foreign-born Americans has tripled in the last five decades. Making America an immigration nation. America has always been an Immigration nation but for the last two and half centuries, the nation has experienced a tripling of its foreign born population.

The population of immigrants in the United States is approximately above 50 millions, with a total of 2 million Immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa.

For many Americans, the current levels of immigration threaten their sense of national identity. So is this crisis of identity an effect on the African diaspora populations.

The Question of Identity.

In ‘A turn in the South’ V. S. Naipaul expresses a worry about losing one’s past and one’s historical identity in the melting pot of the present.

However, Naipaul was addressing the Indian communities of Martinique during his travels in the Caribbean. How Indians had been swamped by Martinique, annihilating their own cultures and religion. Racially and in other ways, they had become something other.

Of Course this feeling of taint and spiritual annihilation occurred over time. Little by little without noticing, you become someone else, you look someone different, you even sound foreign to yourself. Time erodes you, little by little you become alienated.

The case for African immigrants is no different.

The issue of identity demands a closer examination in the particular context of assessing the practice of multiculturalism today in America. One of the central issues must be how African immigrants are seen. Should they be categorized in terms of inherited traditions, religion, or the community in which they happen to be born, taking that unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving profession, politics, class, gender, language, social involvement, and many other connections? Or should they be understood as persons of many affiliations.

Through identifying with these new affiliations, a lot is lost. We are not in a position to define these changes as good or bad, evil or pure since these are personal developments, although correctively as a community, majorly the diaspora communities a lot are at stake.  

 Undocumented as a factor

The study which was conducted by the Centre for migration studies in New York (CMS) estimated over 580,000 Black undocumented immigrants, accounting 5.6 percent of the total undocumented immigrants living in the United States. This study was conducted in 2022, which means the numbers might have dropped or increased, but the probabilities of these numbers hiking is higher than the numbers dropping because of the recent immigrant crisis in the south (US/Mexico) border.

I happened to interview a black immigrant over the phone, to receive firsthand information of being undocumented immigrant in the USA. 

Mr. Serunjoji(pseudonym), has been to the USA since September of 2023 (his visa category, I did not ask) but his Visa will soon expire and has no plans of returning to his native country Uganda.

‘How do you survive,’- was my first question I asked him. Out of curiosity.  

‘What do you mean?’ he responded nervously.

Well you need an SSN (Social Security Number), he says. In the USA the social security number is used to track lifetime earnings and the number of years worked. But this is offered to the U.S. Citizens and eligible U.S. residents who apply for one. Then the question is, where do the ineligible residents get one?

The immigrant communities have created a system where one person can  use another person’s SSN, which means you will have to use their identities too.

Mr. Serunjoji is now known as Frank Mutebi (pseudonym) at his place of work. His age, name, family background is now of a different person.

“Isn’t it difficult, identifying yourself as a different person?”

Yes is tough-Frank says. Can you imagine some people who have survived like this for over 20years.