A new report from Bloomberg ranks Nigerians working in the
United States as the eight most hardworking foreigners in the country.
Nigerians scored 71.0 percent in the list of the hardest and most skilled
immigrant groups in the US which was topped by Ghana with 75.2 percent.
Bulgaria and Kenya were ranked second and third with 74.2
percent and 73.4 percent respectively. Other African countries in the report’s
top 10 are Ethiopia (4th), Egypt (5th), and Liberia (9th).
This makes Africans in general the most productive
immigrants in the US ahead of those from Mexico and Central America, who
constitute more than 70 percent of foreign nationals in the country. Mexico is
by far the most common country of origin, but the population of Mexican
immigrants in the U.S. (both documented and undocumented) actually fell 6
percent from 2007 to 2015, according to the Pew Research Centre.
The numbers of Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans in the
U.S. continued to grow. “If we want more high-skilled, hardworking, English-speaking,
ready-to-integrate immigrants, it looks like the most obvious place to find
them is in African countries where English is widely spoken,” Bloomberg
journalist Justin Fox, who came up with the report, said.
The report, developed from the 2016 US Census Bureau
American Community Survey, ranked Nigeria 8th among the Most-Educated Immigrant
Groups in the U.S. Nigeria sandwiched between Australia (7th) and Malaysia
(9th). The report put the number of Nigerian legal immigrants in the U.S. at
262,603. According to the report, Kenya, Nigeria, Nepal and Ghana have the
highest number of citizens pursuing higher education in the US after Saudi
Arabia.
Immigrants from Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are near the top in
both employment-population ratio and higher-education enrollment, it said.
