Afro-Caribbean immigrants are the sleeping giant of New York City politics – a stirring Goliath not yet quite awakened to its full strength. This is a common lament among Afro-Caribbean community leaders. They complain low rates of political participation have prevented Afro-Caribbean immigrants from achieving a level of electoral and governing influence commensurate with their growing numbers. One leader, long active in the city's political life, fretfully observed, “In our community, we have too many aspiring leaders, and too few followers” (Sengupta 1996a, 8). He and other elites believe Afro-Caribbean political mobilization has been slow, halting, and frustratingly out of pace with the group's increasing numerical strength and the ambitions of its politically minded leaders. These worries about the relative political quiescence of Afro-Caribbean immigrants inevitably prompt questions about the group's long-term prospects for incorporation.

Under both the pluralist and the minority group perspectives, the incorporation process begins with new groups' mobilizing and participating in formal – and sometimes informal – politics. These first steps toward political integration are measured typically in increased rates of registration, voting, and – in the case of first-generation immigrants – naturalization. These basic political acts are all taken as indices of a group's growing engagement with the American democratic process. They often serve as building blocks for other forms of political participation. That is, engagement in one arena, say, voting in local elections, is usually correlated with participation in other arenas (Verba et al. 1995).