Canarsie has always been a neighborhood for middle class immigrants. Beginning in the 1920’s, Canarsie began to fill up with many Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution from Russia and its surrounding nations as well as Southern Italians fleeing economic poverty in the lower Italian regions.

For the next fifty years, these Italian and Jewish immigrants as well as their children continued to reside in the neighborhood. Other Jewish immigrants who arrived later as well as the newer Italian immigrants continued to stream into Canarsie up until the 1980’s. Throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, Canarsie received a large number of Jews and Italians from nearby Brownsville whose families originally came to America in the early 1900’s.

These Italians and Jews fled to Canarsie due to the increasing population of immigrant West Indian families in Brownsville. However, in the 1980’s, the West Indian immigrants from the Caribbean islands began to arrive in Canarsie in large numbers. In the early 1980’s, about 85% of Canarsie was white, and by 1990, 75% of Canarsie was white. Although the Italians and Jews did not flee Canarsie immediately following the Caribbean influx as they did in Brownsville, they eventually left by the late 1990’s after fighting the influx for several years.

There was a scandal surrounding the busing of minority students into the white Canarise school districts that was a flash point for the racial tension of the time period. The teachers and PTA members complained that the new students were bringing the schools down but the busing continued. Eventually some whites turned to violence but most just left the area.

By 2000, 75% of Canarsie was West Indian, and today, about 95% of Canarsie is West Indian. The largest West Indian immigrant population in Canarsie is Haitian, while many are from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and others originate from Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. The West Indian immigrants from these countries left their homeland mainly because they lived in utter poverty on the islands, and they came to the U.S. to try to make better lives for themselves.

In 2000, Haitians were the second largest immigrant group while Jamaicans were the largest immigrant group, but today, Haitians are the largest immigrant group due to the enormous influx of Haitians to Canarsie and the rest of New York following the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake.