For those of you who missed the Common Event last night, the slides are now available from http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/faculty/2014/01/29/seminar-2-opening-common-event-2014/.
Prof. B has asked that you send him a brief comment on what surprised or excited you in his presentation, as a make-up exercise (and also because it’s interesting to know).
The slides from Joe Salvo’s talk from the Common Event provided a number of shocking statistics about the people who live in New York. One of the most shocking ones for me was that 49% of the New York City population speaks a language other than English at home, almost half of the population. Linked to this statistic is one that stated that 23% of people living in New York City are not proficient in English, which is almost one fourth of the people in New York City. This goes to show that English is not all too common at all, which makes sense because the United States does not have an official language. Another surprising finding that I came across in looking through the slides was that the population of black non-Hispanics and white non-Hispanics are decreasing while the population of Asian non-Hispanics and Hispanics are increasing. Also, most new comers are moving to the Bronx, where the poverty rate is highest in the South Bronx in comparison to the rest of New York City. One fact that was mentioned was that the number of immigrants has been sharply decreasing in the past years, but the number of foreign-born people has been increasing. This was explained by data that suggests that foreign-born people have been moving to New York from other parts of the country and are also better educated, coming especially from Asia (particularly India). In the larger picture it seems that the new comers are better educated and have higher skills but are met with rough initial conditions (since most of the newcomers are moving to the Bronx where the poverty rate is highest in all of New York City).