By Wayne Dawkins

(Trice Edney Wire) – For 200 years – the 17th and 18th centuries – Africans came to America involuntarily and enslaved. Then fast forward to the 21st century. The news is Sub Saharan Africans are coming to America willingly, in search of opportunity and freedom.

The trend was driven by the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration law that ended 40 years of racially discriminatory U.S. policy that preferred Northern European immigrants but rejected Southern and Eastern Europeans, plus other peoples from Asia and Africa.

By 1980, 15 years after Hart-Celler, reported the Migration Policy Institute, 130,000 African immigrants had arrived in the United States. In subsequent decades the numbers climbed to:

* 265,000 in 1990,

* 691,000 in 2000,

* 1,327,000 in 2010, and

* 2,094,000 in

See Full Page