The Importance of Hubs and Context for West Indian Immigrants: A Review Essay on New Scholarship on West Indians

The 1950s and '60s were pivotal years for African and Caribbean immigrants; more inclusive immigration policies made migration to the United States and Canada more accessible for immigrants who were not White or European.The prevalence of these new Black immigrants, especially West Indians, ignited numerous studies on ethnic diversity within the Black community in the United States.Scholars within this body of literature have either focused on West Indians as the Black success story (Sowell, 1978), or they have attempted to recontextualize this success story through the lens of racialized hierarchies in the United States (Bashi and McDaniel, 1997; Pierre, 2004).Adding to this debate, Terry-Ann Jones and Vilna Bashi highlight through their provocative works the importance of context and social networks for the success of West Indian immigrants and their incorporation into the United States.Terry-Ann Jones's book, Jamaican Immigrants in the United States and Canada, explores why individuals from Jamaica migrating to two very similar industrial countries, Canada and the United States, would have such different experiences.Moreover, she also discusses the extent to which geographic location and socioeconomic status affect transnationalism for Jamaican migrants.She concludes that these divergent experiences are a reflection of the different structural and racial contexts of the United States and Canada (13).Jones selects Toronto and South Florida as her two research sites.She chooses these two urban areas because they both have a relatively large Jamaican population, but very few studies have actually examined the experiences of Jamaicans in these areas.In her comparison of Jamaicans in Toronto and South Florida, Jones explores three core themes.Her first theme examines the impact that structural factors have on the mobility of Jamaican immigrants; within her structural factors she specifically explores immigration policies, labor markets, and immigrant organizations.Her next theme focuses on whether the racial compositions in the United States and Canada affect the incorporation and socioeconomic mobility of Jamaican migrants.Her last theme explores how geographic context shapes transnationalism for Jamaican migrants (43-44).Jones addresses her three core themes by employing an array of qualitative and quantitative methods.Her quantitative methods are comprised of census data from the United States and Canada along with statistics from the United States Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.Her qualitative methods are drawn from interviews with 52 Jamaicans in Toronto and 48 Jamaicans in South Florida.The results of this study indicate a slight socioeconomic difference between Jamaican immigrants in Canada and the United States.Jamaicans in South Florida have higher levels of education and incomes as well as higher levels of home and business ownership than Jamaicans in Toronto (158).Jones reveals that what affects socioeconomic mobility among Jamaican immigrants in the United States and Canada is the different racial and ethnic compositions in these two areas.The absence of a native Black

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