H-Diplo: New posted content
Hume on Ludwig, 'Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America' [Review]
Ludwig, Bernadette. Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America. : Rutgers University Press, 2026. 222 pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 9781978843073.
Reviewed by Susan E. Hume (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)
Published on H-Diplo (September, 2026)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=63026
Publication of Bernadette Ludwig’s Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America arrives against a backdrop of recent policy restrictions and reversals that have severely limited who can legally enter, live, and work in the United States. In his second term, President Donald Trump has used executive orders to indefinitely suspend the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) and fully or partially restrict legal entry of foreign nationals from thirty-nine countries. The president’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship was struck down by the US Supreme Court in June 2026. However, the high court also ruled that the Department of Homeland Security Secretary had authority to grant, extent, or terminate a country’s Temporary Protective Status (TPS) designation, thus opening the door to terminate TPS beneficiaries’ permission to legally live and work in the United States.
Just as migration is interwoven into the history of America, so too is nativism. Yet the current administration’s rapid and wide-ranging implementation of anti-immigrant policies represents a fierce backlash against six decades of legislation that provided legal pathways for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers to live and work in the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 replaced the nation-based quota system prioritizing northern and western Europeans with policies promoting family reunification and employment-based admissions. The comprehensive Refuge Act of 1980 established the aforementioned USRAP. The Immigration Act of 1990 created the aforementioned TPS and the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. This latter program gives people from countries traditionally underrepresented in the US who have postsecondary education and work experience the opportunity to participate in an annual visa lottery.[1] Notably, the Congressional Record shows that these three pieces of legislation received overwhelming bipartisan support and were signed into law by Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
Census data indicate that migration of sub-Saharan Africans to the United States began as a trickle in the 1960s, but grew exponentially in subsequent decades. According to the Immigration Policy Institute, approximately 2.5 million people from sub-Saharan African countries lived in the US in 2024; 46 percent of this population held a bachelor’s degree or higher and 60 percent were naturalized US citizens. However, they comprised only about 5 percent of the country’s foreign-born.[2] This may explain why relatively little research has been devoted to this population compared to immigrants and refugees from other world regions.
Scholarly research to from the past quarter century on the contemporary experiences of Africans in the United States generally fall into three categories. First, macroscale data-driven demographic analyses have compared how people from African countries fare throughout the US within nationalities (e.g., based on gender or race) or among diverse African nationalities and native-born populations, such as African Americans.[3] Second, survey-based research paired with demographics have combined qualitative and quantitative data to compare African nationalities across US cities.[4] Third, the most common methodology within sociology (or another discipline?) has been an interview-based phenomenological approach exploring the lived experiences of people within a single nationality or among many African nationalities living in a single city or across several US cities.[5] The common thread running through this body of research, as well as Unwelcome Shores, is how the intersection of race and immigrant/refugee status has shaped the experiences of Africans in the United States.
Much of this scholarship was yet to be published when Bernadette Ludwig began her longitudinal ethnographic study of Liberians in Staten Island, New York. She immersed herself in Park Hill’s Liberian refugee community as a volunteer in grassroots organizations and in the Staten Island office of the International Rescue Committee for nearly two years prior to launching formal research. The findings detailed in Unwelcome Shores are drawn from in-depth interviews with fifty-five Liberians, some of whom she interviewed multiple times. Most of these individuals arrived in the US as refugees, asylees, or through TPS, but a few entered as immigrants through family reunification and three via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. Not only the depth but also the breadth of Ludwig’s research is notable in that she also interviewed three employees of local or international nongovernmental organizations who worked with Liberian refugees, as well as ten native-born Black Americans who were long-time residents of Park Hill. Detailed fieldnotes of observations from her entire fifteen years in the community supplemented the interviews.
This work is the culmination of the author’s wide-ranging research findings that are used to explore and analyze Liberia’s historical context, how Liberians came to be in the US, their encounters with America’s anti-Black racism, and their interactions with native-born Black Americans. Ludwig opens chapters with vignettes drawn from her interviews as a way to personalize the challenges that are the theme of each chapter. She continues to weave individuals’ thoughts and experiences throughout chapters to illustrate discussions of larger themes, while also incorporating research findings and theories from fellow scholars. The author concludes with what the US government and refugee resettlement agencies can learn from this case study of Liberians in Staten Island.
Drawing on the work of other scholars, Ludwig provides deep historical context behind the refugee crisis that led to the arrival of tens of thousands of Liberians in the United States beginning in the early 1990s. Liberia’s unique founding as an American colony in 1822 is rooted in the American Colonial Society’s (ACS) mission to resettle free-born and emancipated Black people outside of the United States. The ACS had support from strange bedfellows that included Quaker abolitionists in the North and slave-owning Southern planters. The people who migrated to Liberia between the 1820s and 1890s became known as Americo Liberians. On the one hand, they were refugees fleeing a country suspicious of their status as free Blacks and wrought with viscous Black stereotypes and racial violence that continued to threaten their lives long after emancipation. On the other hand, Americo Liberians were also colonial settlers who subjugated Indigenous Liberians, appropriated their land, and sought to civilize them through Christian conversion and cultural repression.
Americo Liberians held continuous political power from the country’s independence in 1847 until a military coup d’état in 1980. The horrendous widespread violence of Liberia’s back-to-back civil wars from 1989 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2003 resulted in 250,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of people displaced within the country, and hundreds of thousands more escaping to neighboring countries. After years of daily struggle to survive in refugee camps, the overwhelming majority of people returned to Liberia on their own or with assistance from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Some Liberians chose to remain in neighboring countries, even after the UNHCR coordinated the closure of refugee camps. Others began the lengthy and fraught process of seeking resettlement in a third country, in particular the United States. Like generations of people before them from other parts of the world, the author describes these Liberian migrants as people who imagined America as a land of plenty where they could prosper, feel safe, and provide better educational and economic opportunities to secure their children’s future.
The author describes in detail the central role voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) have in the lives of recent refugee arrivals. These organizations work directly with USARP to coordinate refugee resettlement and contract with the federal government to provide services. They are often church-affiliated, as was the case of Lutheran Social Services in Staten Island. VOLAGs find housing for refugees ideally near public transportation, VOLAG-provided services, employment opportunities, and fellow compatriots. On Staten Island’s North Shore, the area around Park Hill already had a small population of Liberians who arrived in the 1970s and ’80s. Ludwig notes that those assisting Liberian refugees in the 1990s and early 2000s also searched for larger apartments to accommodate bigger families, as well as an established native-born Black community in highly racially segregated Staten Island. VOLAG staff nationwide tried to stretch their funding with the goal of helping more people. This often resulted in refugee resettlement in cities’ least desirable areas. This was the case in Staten Island, where refugees Ludwig interviewed found themselves in crumbling, vermin-infested apartments. Park Hill had a reputation for drugs, crime, and gang violence since the 1980s. The stress of being newcomers was compounded by their living situation as well as stereotypes others assigned to them by living in this neighborhood.
VOLAGs provide refugees with caseworkers, employment services, language and literacy training, and enrollment assistance in programs to receive government benefits, all under the directive of getting refugees “job ready” and economically self-sufficient ninety days after arrival. Without time to pursue education, advanced job training, and credentials for qualifications they already possessed, refugees were forced into menial jobs. In Staten Island, that included fast-food restaurants and gendered jobs with security companies and home health aid agencies. Despite the burden of a low-paying job, Ludwig found that employment gave refugees a sense of purpose and agency after years of upheaval. It also enabled them to send remittances to family left behind.
The concentration of Liberians in Park Hill grew not only through refugee resettlement, but also via secondary migration of people USARP had resettled in other parts of the US. This clear expression of personal agency is common among refugees after initial resettlement support dries up. The result is ethnic communities clustered in a smaller number of US cities. Such is the case of Park Hill, where a culturally rich “Little Liberia” developed. In 2026, between six thousand and eight thousand Liberians and Liberian Americans live in Staten Island, particularly around Park Hill (p. 58). Neighborhood safety improved as people socialized on sidewalks and market women began selling all kinds of produce, food, fabric, and other items Liberians associated with home. Many of these women were returning to work they had previously performed and they fulfilled the culturally specific needs of Liberians and other West Africans in the area. Ludwig describes the vibrance of this community’s cultural landscape as well as its rich social life.
Liberians experience Black racism in American society similar to Black Americans. They are also the targets of xenophobia and anti-refugee hostility in places with larger populations of Liberian refugees, such as Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Staten Island. Early positive interactions with VOLAG caseworkers and managers gave Liberians favorable impressions of white Americans. As their contacts expanded to include bosses, coworkers, customers, landlords, school officials, other parents, sales clerks, fellow bus passengers, etc., they frequently encountered varying degrees of animosity from white Americans. Ludwig relays stories of housing discrimination that limits Liberians to Park Hill and employment discrimination that impedes job opportunities despite their ability to speak English. NYC Police Department data shows markedly high rates of stops in Staten Island’s North Shore (p. 108). Encounters with police harassment and brutality cause Liberians to fear for themselves and their children. These combined experiences shape how Black refugees integrate into American society and whether they feel they can ever belong.
Adapting the work of previous scholars, Ludwig theorizes that Liberians draw upon a refugee-specific dual frame of reference to contextualize and cope with anti-Black racism in the United States.[6] For example, they contrast white American antagonism with the positive relationships they had with white American VOLAG employees in the early months of resettlement. Another coping strategy that Liberians employed was to compare and attempt to minimize racism in the US to the inequalities Americo Liberians imposed upon Indigenous Liberians or the identity-based brutality people faced during Liberia’s civil wars. Furthermore, some of those interviewed confided that they didn’t feel obligated to challenge racism in the United States because the saw themselves as sojourners who would someday return home.
By interviewing both Liberian refugees and their Black American neighbors, Ludwig is able to explore their complicated relationships with one another. The early 1990s, at the start of the Liberian population growth in and around Park Hill seemed to be the most trying for intragroup relations. Some VOLAG staff and many Liberian refugees imagined that native-born Black Americans would welcome them into the community, but many long-time residents saw these newcomers as interlopers competing with them for scarce resources. Some members of each community accused the other of believing their own culture was superior to the other’s culture. As people began to reach across the divide to find common ground, such as coming together for Black History Month celebrations, they had to negotiate their differences. For example, native-born community members did not support the idea of a “Staten Island African Heritage Parade” because they felt “African” in the name excluded them, but they could get behind the “Black Heritage Family Day Parade” (p. 150). Like many African and Caribbean refugees and immigrants before them, some Liberians wanted to distance themselves from Black Americans and remain culturally distinct in the false belief that they could avoid negative stereotypes and discrimination borne by Black Americans.
While some young people’s parents envisioned returning home someday, Liberians who arrived as children (i.e., the 1.5 generation) and American-born children (i.e., the second generation) understood that they must learn to survive and thrive in the United States. Educated in American schools and steeped in Black American culture alongside their parents’ culture, it was these Liberian Americans who realized Black people in Staten Island could gain political power by throwing their support behind Black candidates of any nationality. As a Black voting bloc emerged composed of North Shore’s American, Caribbean, and African residents, a native-born Black American was elected to the city council for the first time in 2009, and a second-generation Guinean was elected to the state assembly in 2018. Both are seats that Black people have continued to hold.
Out of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the country’s civil wars, only 35,000 Liberian refugees resettled in the US between the early 1990s and 2024 (p. 44). Ludwig echoes the argument of other immigration scholars that the US government has a long history of marginalizing Black African refugees compared to people from other parts of the world.[7] The evidence of this includes USARP consistently setting the lowest resettlement quotas for Africa compared to any other region and setting a higher threshold for proving persecution to qualify for admission.[8] The author argues that it is harder for white Americans, including those in decision-making positions, to see the humanity of Black war or natural disaster victims. Those lucky few who are resettled in host communities such as Staten Island bear the stigma of being a Black refugee, a label that can be laden with racial stereotypes about poverty and welfare dependence.
Drawing on work experience with refugees and immigrants in Atlanta early in her career as well as her research in Staten Island, Ludwig concludes with policy recommendations for USARP (when the current suspension of its work is someday lifted) and programming suggestions for VOLAGs. First, USARP should broaden the categories under which Africans can argue their cases for refugee status that is on par with people elsewhere. Second, USARP should provide more programming and financial support for refugees with professional skills to be recertified in the US, rather than pressuring them to take menial jobs to achieve economic self-sufficiency in ninety days. She notes that this kind of support was provided to Cubans who arrived in the 1950s. Third, USARP’s Cultural Orientation curriculum includes a suggested supplemental lesson on police interactions, but this lesson needs to be required for the safety and survival of Black refugees.
The author recommends that VOLAGs offer education materials and/or training for local government offices, school officials, health care providers, and police departments about the cultural and linguistic needs of recently resettled refugees. This includes a reminder of the federal law that requires any institution receiving federal funding to provide interpreter services free of charge. Additionally, she stresses the importance of VOLAGs communicating with local neighborhood residents, religious institutions, and community organizations about these newcomers to their community as a way to reduce tension and misunderstandings.
Studies that closely parallel the work documented in Unwelcome Shores include Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota (1999) and Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine(2016), but other books like these are scarce. The publication of Unwelcome Shores not only deepens our understanding of the challenges that Black refugees experience in the US, but also adds another piece to our understanding of America’s foreign-born African mosaic. It is also part of the larger conversation about what it means to be Black in America.
Notes
[1]. The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful timeline summarizing “U.S. Postwar Immigration Policy” from 1952 to 2025 on its website, updated June 9, 2025, https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-postwar-immigration-policy.
[2]. Immigration Policy Institute, “Migration Information Source: Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in the United States,” October 16, 2025, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/journal/spotlight/sub-saharan-african-immigrants-united-states.
[3]. Readers interested in data-driven demographic analyses should consider Tod G. Hamilton’s Immigration and the Remaking of Black America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2019); and Mamadi Corra’s African Immigrants in the United States: The Gendering Significance of Race? (Lexington Books, 2022).
[4]. John A. Arthur’s Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (Praeger, 2000) was foundational in providing scholars with early insight into the social networks, family patterns, employment characteristics, and cultural identities of the growing wave of African immigrants.
[5]. See, for example, Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2002); Ezekiel Umo Ette, Nigerian Immigrants in the United States: Race, Identity, and Acculturation (Lexington Books, 2011); Frances Musoni, Iddah Otieno, Angene Wilson, and Jack Wilson, Voices of African Immigrants in Kentucky: Migration, Identity, and Transnationality (University Press of Kentucky, 2020); and Mariam Konaté and Fredah Mainah, Sub-Saharan African Immigrants' Stories of Resilience and Courage (Anthem Press, 2026).
[6]. The author cites John U. Ogbu, “From Cultural Differences to Differences in Cultural Frame of Reference” in Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, ed. Patricia M. Greenfield and Rodney R. Cocking (Psychology Press, 1994); and Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, “The Cultural Psychology of Hispanic Immigrants,” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Anthology, ed. Thomas Weaver (Arte Publico Press, 1994) when discussing “(positive) dual frame of reference” on p. 98.
[7]. The author cites on p. 69 Jill Esbenshade, “Discrimination, DNA Testing, and Dispossession: Consequences of U.S. Policy for African Refugees,” Souls 13, no. 2 (2011): 175-196; and Nadine El-Enany, “Aylan Kurdi: The Human Refugee,” Law and Critique 27, no. 1 (2016): 13-15; and on p. 70 Carolle Charles, “Political Refugees or Economic Immigrants? A New ‘Old Debate’ Within the Haitian Immigrant Communities but with Contestations and Division,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 2/3 (2006): 190-208, among others to support her argument.
[8]. The author cites Esbenshade, “Discrimination, DNA Testing, and Dispossession”; and Jens Manuel Krogstad and Jynnah Radford, “Key Facts about Refugees in the U.S,” Pew Research Center (2017) to support this claim on p. 70.
Susan E. Hume is a professor of geography whose research includes the experiences of African refugees in Portland, Oregon; Bosnian refugees in St. Louis, Missouri; and African university students in Eugene, Oregon, and Washington, DC.
Citation: Susan E. Hume. Review of Ludwig, Bernadette. Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. September, 2026.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=63026
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
