In 2000, New York City was home to 369,186 foreign-born individuals from the Caribbean island nation of the Dominican Republic. They were the largest immigrant group in the city, constituting 12.9 percent of the city’s total foreign born population of 2,871,032.
The above pie chart shows the percentage of Dominican foreign born in New York City who entered the United States under various visa admission categories between 1990 and 1999. As you can see, the majority of foreign-born Dominicans (60.6 percent) entered the country under the family preferences category. Almost all the rest (37.9 percent) came in as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. Only half of a percent entered the United States with an employment-based visa. During the 1990-1999 period, Dominican-born individuals in New York City used neither diversity visas nor refugee visas to enter the United States.
This stacked bar graph shows the settlement of foreign-born Dominicans in each of New York City’s five boroughs, for both 1990 and 2000. The percentage of foreign-born Dominicans living in Manhattan increased by 33.5 percent during this decade (from 93,713 in 1990 to 125.063 in 2000), while the Bronx experienced an increase of 109.8 percent (from 59,108 in 1990 to 124,032 in 2000). The population of foreign-born Dominicans in other boroughs changed less dramatically during the same 10-year period.
The above bar graph shows that, in 2000, foreign-born Dominicans aged 25 and over had weaker educational profiles, compared to both native-born New Yorkers and the city’s foreign born population more generally. A comparatively high percentage of foreign-born Dominicans had not completed high school and a comparative low percentage had earned a college degree. It also shows that over 70 percent of foreign-born Dominicans aged five and over were not English proficient, a larger percentage than for all foreign-born New Yorkers.
The first of these two pie charts shows that, in 2000, the vast majority of foreign-born Dominican males aged 16 and over in New York City occupied jobs in the production, transportation, and material moving industry. The second pie chart breaks down the occupations of foreign-born Dominican women aged 16 and over and illustrates that a majority of them held jobs in the service industry. Very few Dominicans occupied jobs that required a college degree, or even a high school diploma. Dominicans served at the lowest levels of the job totem pole, and a significant percentage had jobs that involved manual labor and pay low wages.
Sources:
Lobo, Arun Peter, and Joseph J. Salvo. 2004. The Newest New Yorkers, 2000: Immigrant New York in the New Millennium. New York: New York City Department of City Planning, Population Division.
Pessar, Patricia R., and Pamela M. Graham. 2001. “Dominicans: Transnational Identities and Local Politics.” Pp. 251-73 in New Immigrants in New York, edited by Nancy Foner. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sengupta, Somni. 1996. “Immigrants in New York Pressing Drive for Dual Nationality.” New York Times (December 30).
Click on another immigrant group name (Chinese, Mexicans, Haitians, or Russians) to explore the statistical data of foreign-born New Yorkers from that nationality group.
