Immigration and equal opportunity

African Americans have long watched successive waves of immigrants enter the United States at the bottom of the economic ladder only to bypass them in a generation or two. Prior to the civil rights era, African Americans faced systematic exclusion from and discrimination within most U.S. labor markets, while immigrants were generally able to gain access and advance within these same markets, though not entirely without resistance (Alba and Nee 2003). Over time, immigrants moved steadily up the socioeconomic ladder while African Americans did not.