Some Americans believe immigrants steal American jobs, but one University of Cincinnati researcher says most immigrants are out to create their own.

The term immigrant is one of much controversy in the United States.
In 2009, foreign-born people made up 12.5 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This has hastily led people to believe that immigrants come
to the United States and steal jobs from Americans, said Leila Rodriguez, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati.

However, a UC researcher is in the midst of dispelling this
common perception.

“I wanted to bring attention to the fact that the immigration phenomenon is much wider and complex than just ‘Mexicans in the United States,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez has done extensive research on the Nigerian business community in America. What she has found is that, rather than stealing already existing jobs in the United States, Nigerians come here to start their own businesses.

Although African immigrants make up only a small portion of all immigrants in the U.S., Rodriguez said she finds them interesting because most of them are highly educated and entrepreneurial.

Instead of being rejected by the U.S. job market and forced into self-employment like many other immigrants, they choose this path because they were already entrepreneurs in their native country, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez researched these small business owners for one year in New York City to determine how they assimilate into this globalized world.

“I trace how Nigerian immigrants come with the African model in mind, but do not just passively adopt Western business ideals,” Rodriguez said. “Instead, they pick and choose what is most useful to them from both models to create something that looks new.”

Rodriguez said she hopes that this research will give Americans a new outlook on immigrants and international migration as
a whole.

“For some reason we are shocked to learn that labor moves around the world,” Rodriguez said. That’s really what most immigrants are — human labor that has moved to another country as a consequence of globalization.”