My level of interest in Joe Salvo’s talk stemmed mostly from the mere meticulous nature of his work, in general. I found it very alluring how one can take simple statistics of immigrants inhabiting a city and make it into a broad area of research, study, and analysis. Prior to his talk, I had not even considered such numbers, graphs, or charts to be as substantial or influential as Salvo ultimately made them out to be. I was, however, soon convinced that this area of study could be far more consequential than I would have ever considered. I realized that it is important to notice such trends of immigrants who inhabit certain boroughs of New York City and those who move out and move in every year, and in consequence, the reasons behind such migration. Even so, however, I’ve remained skeptical about this area of study, mostly because of how subjective it still seems to me. Although numbers and statistics are viable contenders of SHOWING to us the movement of people within different parts of the city, they do not do much in telling us the reasons behind such. This creates a pretty big loophole in the study because I think these reasons can greatly vary family to family or individual to individual.
Salvo’s talk also made my view on New York City’s diversity waver for a bit. All this time, I had always thought of New York City as being immensely diverse and supreme in its unique diversity. In spite of this, I didn’t really stop and think about how many communities are largely populated by a single culture or ethnicity, which can, in a sense, counteract the diversity that exists. Upon reevaluation, though, I realized that while people may have their own reasons for preferring to live in communities dominated by their own culture, this should not diminish the vast diversity that surrounds them. Although one may choose to live in a community with people of their own culture, this does not isolate them from those of other cultures completely or even at all. The opportunities to mingle with people from different ethnicities are limitless and the points at which one must interact with people outside their own culture are inevitable.
Two questions I had from the Talk:
1) How can you objectively evaluate reasons behind migration from point A to point B within the city?
2) What overall benefit or practical use can the study of these statistics bring to us in the future?
– Nadera Rahman
