An American
immigration expert has revealed that there are an estimated 30,000 Kenyans
residing illegally in the United States. In an interview with the Daily Nation, Jeffey Passel, a Senior Demographer
at the Pew Research Center [O1] in Washington, admitted that the
widely quoted numbers in the media were inaccurate.
Passel states
that he derived this figure from statistics of visa admissions in the country
as well as data from the U.S. Census Bureau. He states that “the numbers that
have been quoted in the past tend to be quite inaccurate”.
On a NTV talk
show—The Trend— on Sunday, former Kenyan Ambassador to the U.S. Elkannah Odembo
claimed that close to 200,000 Kenyans in America
did not have their papers in order.
However,
Passel notes that embassies overestimate the number of their nationals in
foreign lands. “Embassies tend to think that there are a lot of their nationals
in America than the data indicates,” Passel observed.
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| Feeling at home away from home: Events like the IRB Rugby Series are favourite meeting points for Kenyans in the diaspora (Image courtesy of www.jambonewspot.com) |
Passel also
stated that people arriving in the U.S. often register with their respective
embassies. Even after they return home, the embassies think that they are still
living in the country because these people do not inform the latter of their
departure.
Kenyans
living in the U.S. have recently found themselves in the spotlight due to
homicidal and suicidal incidents. Two weeks ago, New Jersey police found the
hanging body of Jeffrey Kilibwa at Lafayette Park in Jersey City. In the same state,
another Kenyan man was sentenced to 72 years in jail after being found guilty
of killing his wife and two children.
A 21-year old
Kenyan student at Ivy Tech Community College also lost
his life after a scuffle with several people outside a club in Indianapolis.
Last week, Elisha Ogolla, a mechanical engineering student at a Texas
university died from gunshot wounds obtained under mysterious circumstances.
The U.S. has
been an attractive destination for Kenyans who migrate there for employment
opportunities, higher education or to visit their relatives. A study by the
Migration Policy Institute in 2011 revealed that Kenyans constituted the largest African diaspora in the United
States.
Within the
Eastern African region, Ethiopia is the leading country of origin with close to
150, 000 of its nationals living in the U.S.
A study in
2010 titled, Homeland Citizen Perception
of and Attitudes toward their Diaspora: A Study of Kenyans and Tanzanians, unearthed
the perceptions and attitudes of Kenyans back home towards their counterparts
in the diaspora.
The study, spearheaded by the African Migration and
Development Policy Centre (AMADPOC) Executive Director Prof. John Oucho, was
carried out within Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya using the Focus
Group Discussion (FGD) approach to collect information from homogenous or
relatively homogenous groups.
Generally,
FGD participants in the Kenyan study believed that the worsening situation in
the job market was discouraging Kenyans in the diaspora from coming back home.
In Tanzania, participants believed that illegal immigrants of Tanzanian
nationality were afraid to return home because of the likelihood of prosecution
by authorities of the countries of residence because of their illegal status—a
testament that the problem of illegal immigrants is not confined to Kenya
within the East African region. Such people were not expected to make any
remittances to their homeland.
The report
concludes by admitting that the emigration of Kenyans would continue because
the country’s economy would not grow fast enough to absorb the increasing
numbers of highly educated and unemployed Kenyans. Indeed, an Intergovernmental
Authority on Development (IGAD) report last week revealed that Botswana, South
Africa and Namibia were becoming favourite
destinations for skilled Kenyans seeking job opportunities.
