An issue of identity: African and Caribbean immigration to the U.S. is spurring a debate about who qualifies as 'African-American'.(National)

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...roots slave ancestors in the U.S., Kamus may indeed be both African and American, but he is not an "African-American."

"The census is claiming me as an African-American," says Kamus, who is an advocate for African immigrants in Silver Spring, Md. "If walk down the streets, white people see me as an African-American. Yet African-Americans are saying, 'You are not one of us.' So I ask myself, in this country, how do I define myself?"

PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES

That question is increasingly being raised as the growing number of foreign-born blacks in the U.S. inspires a quiet debate over who can claim the term "African-American." The debate could have practical consequences both in the application of affirmative-action programs, which were intended to remedy past discrimination, and in how black Americans of all kinds view themselves.

In the 1990s, the number of blacks in the U.S. with recent roots in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled while the number of blacks with origins in the Caribbean grew by more than 60 percent, according to demographers at the State University of New York at Albany. By 2000, according to census data, foreign-born blacks constituted 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, about 34 percent of the blacks in Miami, and about 25 percent in Montgomery County, Md., the Washington, D.C., suburb that includes Silver Spring.

In recent years, black immigrants and their children have become more visible in universities, the workplace, and in politics, with Colin L. Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, serving as Secretary of State, and Barack Obama, born to a Kenyan father and an American mother, winning a U.S. Senate seat last month representing Illinois and emerging as...

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