Having lived in New York City for most of my life, I didn’t expect to learn much from Mr. Salvo; surprisingly, he presented an overwhelming number of facts and figures, a lot of which I didn’t actually know. For example, though I knew that New York and Los Angeles were the two biggest cities in the country, I hadn’t realized that NYC outnumbered LA by five million people. In fact, the city is so populous that each borough can really be considered its own city. On top of that, New York was said to be continuing to grow, with an influx of more than 300,000 people over the past decade–that’s more than any other top ten cities.

It’s also interesting to note that the number of immigrants coming from other countries has dropped over the past decade–or at least, more and more people are categorizing themselves as Americans. From 1995-2000, half of all New Yorkers were from the country and the other half from outside the country. From 2007-2011, two-thirds now identify as American. This drop in immigration rate may be due to a multitude of factors, but I think the best reason would probably be due to the recession, which really hurt the U.S.’s image as the golden land of economic prosperity. Immigration peaked in the 90s, and this was probably due to the post-Cold War situation that occurred with the collapse of the USSR, leaving the US as the sole superpower of the time. This attracted a lot of immigrants, especially Russians and the like.

Now, with the “bad economy” here, I wouldn’t be surprised that there is an influx into other lucrative countries that are coming up fast (like Brasil, Russia, India, and China). However, the names ‘United States’ and ‘New York’ will always attract immigrants. It’s kind of hard to imagine how New York will be like in 2040. The data claims that there will be around 9 million people at that point, which means that the city will be even more congested than it already is. However it may be, I don’t doubt that immigrants will still constitute an important part of the population.