In 2000, New York City was home to 2.9 million foreign-born residents, the largest number in its history. These immigrants arrived from a multitude of nations and their diversity today is unmatched by that of any other American city. Given the size and history of immigration, it is understandable that immigrants have had, and continue to have, a tremendous impact on New York City’s racial and ethnic composition, as well as its socioeconomic and political development.
With the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the racially discriminatory national origins quota system of the 1920s, the most important immigrant source countries have shifted from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. As a result, what once was a city with a population that consisted primarily of the descendants of European immigrants has now evolved into a place where no ethno-racial or immigrant nationality group dominates. Also, immigration is ongoing: in 2000, 43 percent of the city’s foreign-born population had arrived to the United States in the previous 10 years, and 46 percent of the city’s foreign born spoke a language other than English at home.
The statistical profile assignment that we report on here was meant to teach us to collect, analyze, and present data on the city’s immigrants using charts, graphs, and timelines. Each student was assigned one of the following foreign-born groups: Dominican, Chinese, Mexican, Haitian, and Russian immigrants. Although the immigrant population in New York City consists of many more nationality groups, we focused on these because they are among the largest immigrant groups in the city today. Students then had to conduct research individually using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the publication titled The Newest New Yorkers, 2000: Immigrant New York in the New Millennium (published by the New York City Department of City Planning in 2004) to learn more about the demographic characteristics of these immigrant groups. We next compiled this data into a comprehensive paper covering several topics, including: under what admissions category immigrants entered the United States, the history of their immigration to the United States and New York City, their place of settlement in the city (boroughs and/or neighborhoods), their English language proficiency, educational attainment, and the types of jobs they held.
We then worked in groups of four with classmates who had researched the same immigrant group to compile a web page summarizing the data we collected and analyzed. You can find the fruits of our labor here. A separate link is dedicated to each of five immigrant groups and the pages contain graphs, charts, timelines, and short narratives to explain the numbers and visuals we report.
