What explains the economic success of black immigrants to the United States? The short answer: capitalism.

First, consider some indicators of the success of black immigrants. The census publishes income data by country of ancestry but doesn’t distinguish immigrants from people of the same ancestry born in the U.S. But data show that most black people in the U.S. who identify their ancestry with a specific country in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean are immigrants and many of the rest are children of immigrants.