ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a demographic profile of Haitian Americans and describes how those characteristics have changed over time. It presents a brief summary of 1990 US census data, and provides a general demographic profile of Haitian Americans followed by changes in those demographic characteristics based on the year in which Haitian Americans immigrated to the United States. The 1990 US census provides a unique opportunity to develop a demographic profile of Haitians immigrating to the United States because it has an ethnic category for "Haitian Americans" and a question asking when they came to the United States. The 1990 census provides several possible categories of Haitian Americans living in the United States: those acknowledging Haiti as their primary ancestry, those born in Haiti, and those speaking Haitian Creole at home. The education index patterns suggest a relative educational advantage to earlier Haitian immigrants with recent waves losing that advantage.
