Still the Melting Pot

[ablarc]

Still the melting pot…


NEW YOK CITY FOREIGN BORN POPULATION (2000)
(Not including those born in Puerto Rico, U.S. Island Areas, and born abroad to American parents)

Total: 2,871,032 35.85% of all New York residents

A. The Top Fifteen by Country of Origin

1. Dominican Republic 369,186 4.61%

2. China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan 207,914 2.60%

3. Jamaica 178,922 2.23%

4. Guyana 130,647 1.63%

5. Mexico 122,550 1.53%

6. Ecuador 114,944 1.44%

7. Haiti 95,580 1.19%

8. Colombia 84,404 1.05%

9. Russia 81,408 1.02%

10. Italy 72,481 0.91%

11. Korea 70,990 0.89%

12. Ukraine 69,727 0.87%

13. India 68,263 0.85%

14. Poland 65,999 0.82%

15. Philippines 49,644 0.62%


B. By Region

1. Caribbean 856,229 10.65%
Dominican Republic 369,186 4.61%
Jamaica 178,922 2.23%
Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean 159,446 1.99%
Haiti 95,580 1.19%
Barbados 27,065 0.34%
Cuba 26,030 0.33%

2. East Asia 439,463 5.49%
China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan 261,551 3.27%
China 207,914 2.60%
Hong Kong 31,895 0.40%
Taiwan 21,742 0.27%

Southeast Asia 86,706 1.08%
Philippines 49,644 0.62%
Vietnam 14,707 0.18%
Malaysia 7618 0.10%
Thailand 4148 0.05%
Cambodia 2219 0.03%
Indonesia 2727 0.03%
Laos 418 0.01%
Other South Eastern Asia 5225 0.07%

Korea 70,990 0.89%
Japan 19,415 0.24%
Other Eastern Asia 801 0.01%

3. South America 410,048 5.12%
Guyana 130,647 1.63%
Ecuador 114,944 1.44%
Colombia 84,404 1.05%
Peru 27,278 0.34%
Brazil 14,241 0.18%
Argentina 11,677 0.15%
Venezuela 8181 0.10%
Chile 6780 0.08%
Bolivia 3875 0.05%
Other South America 8021 0.10%

4. Eastern Europe 329,721 4.12%
Russia 81,408 1.02%
Ukraine 69,727 0.87%
Poland 65,999 0.82%
Yugoslavia 19,535 0.24%
Romania 19,280 0.24%
Belarus 11,187 0.14%
Hungary 11,144 0.14%
Czechoslovakia (includes Czech Republic and Slovakia) 8628 0.11%
Bosnia and Herzegovina 2020 0.03%
Other Eastern Europe 40793 0.51%

5. Mexico and Central America 245,142 3.06%
Mexico 122,550 1.53%

Other Central America: 122,592 1.53%
Honduras 32,358 0.40%
El Salvador 26,802 0.33%
Panama 23,118 0.29%
Guatemala 17,936 0.22%
Nicaragua 8284 0.10%
Costa Rica 5819 0.07%
Misc. Other Central America 8275 0.10%

6. Western Europe 227,504 2.83%
Mediterranean 114,469 1.43%
Italy 72,481 0.91%
Greece 29,805 0.37%
Spain 7836 0.10%
Portugal 2718 0.03%
Other Southern Europe 1629 0.02%

Northern Europe 112,586 1.40%
United Kingdom 28,996 0.36%
Germany 27,708 0.35%
Ireland 22,604 0.28%
France 12,386 0.15%
Austria 6700 0.08%
Scandinavia 6128 0.08%
Netherlands 2455 0.03%
Other Northern Europe 5609 0.07%

7. Indian Subcontinent 150,293 1.88%
India 68,263 0.85%
Bangladesh 42,865 0.54%
Pakistan 39,165 0.49%

8. Mideast and Central Asia 118,082 1.48%
Israel 21,288 0.27%
Egypt 15,231 0.19%
Other Northern Africa 8605 0.11%
Turkey 9026 0.11%
Iran 7112 0.09%
Lebanon 5154 0.06%
Syria 5191 0.06%
Afghanistan 4833 0.06%
Armenia 1507 0.02%
Jordan 1407 0.02%
Iraq 1272 0.02%
Other Western and South Central Asia 37,456 0.47%

9. Sub-Saharan Africa 59,421 0.75%
Nigeria 15,689 0.20%
Ghana 14,915 0.19%
Sierra Leone 1599 0.02%
Other Western Africa 15,682 0.20%
Ethiopia 1792 0.02%
Other Eastern Africa 3373 0.04%
Middle Africa 1659 0.02%
Southern Africa: 2498 0.03%
South Africa 2214 0.03%

10. North America 18,105 0.23%
Canada 17,318 0.22%
Other Northern America 748 0.01%
Born at sea 39 0.00%

11. Australia and Oceania 4982 0.06%
Australia 3860 0.05%
Other Australian and New Zealand Subregion 804 0.01%
Melanesia 124 0.00%
Micronesia 36 0.00%
Polynesia 146 0.00%
Oceania, n.e.c. 12 0.00%

[thomasjfletcher]

I believe the number of Australians today is more like 20,000. :roll:

[ablarc]

Must have been some kind of major migration of Australians in the last four years. What would account for that?

[ZippyTheChimp]

I don't think that melting pot is a good symbolic description - implying a transformation into a uniform mass.

I like can of mixed nuts better.

Lots of people coming in from East Asia, despite all those tall buildings.

[thomasjfletcher]

Tall buildings rock.
As for Ozzies, well, they've always been a very well-travelled bunch. Many leave Australia for a few years to work abroad, pretty much just for fun. London has 250,000 at any one time, and there are a bunch in Japan, Hong Kong, etc.
America's recent economic boom, along with the fact that visas have never been easier to get (at least a couple of years ago, not so much now) meant that Australians flooded in... (look at Hollywood!)

[billyblancoNYC]

I agree. Some of the numbers do look a bit weak.

[ablarc]

The numbers were supplied by the census bureau. They only count people who are residents, i.e. have green cards or are citizens. My guess is that most Ozzies are just on temporary visas.

The numbers probably are (famously) weak when it comes to Mexicans and maybe one or two other groups. No way to get them perfect short of gestapo tactics.

[ablarc]

I don't think that melting pot is a good symbolic description - implying a transformation into a uniform mass.

I like can of mixed nuts better.


Traditionally immigrants have assimilated in one generation. Zippy, do you regard yourself as an American, or do you still identify primarily with whatever ethnic group your forebears may have belonged to when they arrived?

Are you possibly implying that the current crop of immigrants, being more racially diverse, will take longer to assimilate unless they intermarry? Or perhaps you think they ought not to assimilate?

An American-born but presumably unassimilated man was recently arrested in Staten Island. He was on his way to blow up the Herald Square subway station.

[thomasjfletcher]

I think the "mixed nuts" metaphor refers to the idea that it's seen as possible today to maintain one's cultural background whilst still being totally American. Multiculturalism as opposed to assimilation.
New York is the best example of that in the world.

[alex ballard]

I still can't believe that Europe has contries on that list (I don't consider Russia to be Europe). Anyway, the number of Chinese in the city seems pretty low. I guess the "Asian boom" really is taking hold over there. But the real shocker: Almost no Indians!!!!Here in Philly, we have TONS of south asians and muslims. Anyone think that if more of these third world contries start getting their act toghether like Asia then the days of NYC as a "melting pot" will be at risk. That (in my opinion) would not be a good thing.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Although it happens in other places, the term Melting Pot is generally applied to New York, and as such, I was regarding it geographically.

Individual cultural assimilation occurs quicky, sometimes to the consternation of immigrant parents. But since migration to New York has always involved large numbers, neighborhoods that started as support areas for immigrants develop into well established ethnic neighborhoods that continue for many generations.

The power of these neighborhoods on the decendants of immigrants is strong. My parents were born in New York and regarded themselves as Americans, as do I. But whenever I am in Little Itlay, I think of my tennaged grandparents struggling to get a foothold in a strange city.

I get that same sense walking through Washington Heights.

[ablarc]

Alex, people are on that list that came here seventy or more years ago as kids; that's what accounts for the large number of Italians. This isn't a tabulation of recent immigration, but rather a cumulative figure.

Also, 2004 figures would show a somewhat higher percentage of Indians, as high Indian immigration is a fairly recent phenomenon. Finally, a preponderance of immigrants from Guyana are Indians.

[billyblancoNYC]

I still can't believe that Europe has contries on that list (I don't consider Russia to be Europe). Anyway, the number of Chinese in the city seems pretty low. I guess the "Asian boom" really is taking hold over there. But the real shocker: Almost no Indians!!!!Here in Philly, we have TONS of south asians and muslims. Anyone think that if more of these third world contries start getting their act toghether like Asia then the days of NYC as a "melting pot" will be at risk. That (in my opinion) would not be a good thing.

I think NYC has the most Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis of anywhere in America, with NJ coming up fast.

As far as Chinese, there are tons. Come to Queens. Over 400K documented, and counting. That's why this list is not the end-all-be-all.

[ablarc]

It's easy to assume that every Chinese-looking person is from China, while many were actually born here, especially the younger ones. These people would appear on a list of New Yorkers of Chinese origin but not on a list of foreign-born persons.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Post moved from another thread:


As you may have known from my first stint here, I have an intense fascination with different cultures and races. Here are some cutures I would like to find within the city and find out how the city is changing demograhically.

Here are some cutures I would like to experience within the city:
Indian
Irish
Japanese
South American
Mexican
German
African/Carribean
Italian
Spanish
Hawiian

Also, how is the city changing? Who's coming over here now? And how big is the flow from the US to NYC?

[Kris]

January 24, 2005

Record Immigration Changing New York's Neighborhoods

By NINA BERNSTEIN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/01/24/nyregion/24immig.xlarge1.jpg
New Americans in Brooklyn in May, from left front, guang zhou, from china; Rahima Khatun, from Bangladesh; and Mario Leonardo Arzu, from Guatemala.

The immigrants who remade New York in the 1990's are now indelibly shaping its future, according to new city figures showing that 6 in 10 babies born in the city since 2000 have at least one foreign-born parent. The foreign-born groups growing fastest through immigration, including Mexicans, Guyanese and Bangladeshis, also have among the highest birthrates, the figures show.

Even for a city with a storied immigrant past, the sheer size and diversity of the present foreign-born population is greater than ever before, according to the most detailed and sweeping portrait of immigrant New York ever to be issued by the City Planning Department. Demographers counted 2.9 million immigrant residents in 2000 and estimate the current number is at least 3.2 million, a record high.

The report, to be released today as a 265-page book called "The Newest New Yorkers 2000: Immigrant New York in the New Millennium," offers a comprehensive look at the foreign-born residents who have transformed the city's neighborhoods, schools and businesses, bringing sari shops to Queens, halal pizza to Brooklyn and Ghanaian preachers to the Bronx. Unlike earlier city reports that dealt only with legal immigrants recorded by federal authorities, this analysis tries to capture legal, illegal and temporary residents alike, combining census information, city housing surveys and vital statistics to offer a fine-grained topography of a global resettlement unmatched by any other metropolis.

One result is the striking emergence of Mexicans as the fifth largest immigrant group in the city. Their census numbers quadrupled to 122,550 in the decade since 1990, when they ranked 17th with 32,689. City demographers said the true growth was still higher, possibly to a total of 200,000, and not expected to slow. Births to the city's Mexican-born mothers - 6,408 in 2000 - are second only to births to foreign-born Dominicans, who remained the most numerous of the city's foreign-born groups at 369,000 residents, followed by the Chinese, the Jamaicans, and the Guyanese.

The report did not try to calculate rates of illegal immigration for Mexicans or any other group, though Mr. Salvo acknowledged that the large increase in the Mexican-born population could not be accounted for by recorded legal immigration. Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center who has studied the issue, said that nationally, 80 to 85 percent of all Mexican immigration since 1990 was undocumented, while among other immigrant groups, a great majority had entered legally.

"Any place that's getting a lot of new immigration from Mexico, virtually all of it is undocumented," Mr. Passel said, "and that certainly includes New York."

Still, the city is home to only 1 percent of Mexicans in the United States - compared with 54 percent of the nation's Dominican-born immigrants and 45 percent of its Bangladeshis, who are the city's fastest-growing group. Too few to count in 1980, Bangladeshis surged to 17th place from 42nd in the 1990's, mainly through diversity visas issued by lottery. They now place 10th in the number of births, with Pakistanis right behind them. One reason is that nearly 80 percent of Bangladeshi households are married-couple families, as are more than 6 in 10 Indian, Chinese, and Pakistani homes, compared with only 31 percent of native-born New Yorkers' households.

At a time when a Congressional push for crackdowns on illegal immigrants is converging with backlogs in legal immigration, the report stresses the economic benefits that sheer numbers of newcomers brought the city in recent decades, replacing residents who died or moved out, filling housing vacancies, revitalizing small businesses, and now accounting for 43 percent of the city's work force. High rates of migration to other states are still offset only by a combination of foreign immigration and births increased by immigrant fertility, the demographers said.

"If we didn't have immigration, I don't know where we'd be," said Joseph Salvo, director of the department's population division and co-author of the report with Arun Peter Lobo. "Immigrant flows have mitigated catastrophic population losses in the 1970's, stabilized the city's population in the 1980's, and helped the city reach a new population peak of over 8 million in 2000."

In the new world limned by the report, ethnicity and race are moving categories. More than a third of the city's black population is now foreign-born, the demographers said, with Afro-Caribbeans, who represent 21 percent of the city's immigrants, tending to replace African-Americans moving outside the city and to southern states, and the African-born population more than doubling to 92,400, or more than 3 percent of the foreign born.

Though Europeans increased in numbers through a surge of refugees and the use of diversity visas, available to people with low rates of recent immigration, like Poland, they declined to 19 percent of the city's foreign-born population from 24 percent. Had the countries of the former Soviet Union been counted together, as in earlier reports, immigrants born there would have been the city's fourth largest group, with 164,000 residents. Instead, Russia placed 10th, with 81,408, with Ukraine, Belarus and others lower on the list.

Nearly a third of city immigrants are from Latin America. Yet they seem as much divided as united by their Hispanic origins, with Mexicans joining the Chinese in Sunset Park, Ecuadoreans in Jackson Heights beside Bangladeshis, and Salvadorans and Guatemalans showing up in Far Rockaway. In that seaside neighborhood, demographers also discovered Russians, Ukrainians, Haitians, Israelis, Nigerians and Jamaicans after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, noticing its unusually high numbers of non-English speakers on a map of literacy needs recently, asked them, "What's going on down there?"

In his 1997 book "A Far Rockaway of the Heart," the Bronx-born poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti might have provided an answer:

Everything changes and nothing changes

Centuries end

and all goes on

as if nothing ever ends...

And the fever of savage city life

still grips the streets

But I still hear singing...

A century ago, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe poured through Ellis Island, the foreign-born made up more than 40 percent of the city's population - 80 percent when their American-born children were counted, too. But the city's total population was then only 4.7 million. At 36 percent of today's 8 million New Yorkers - up from a low of 18 percent in 1970 - the size of today's foreign-born population is a record, and taken together, foreign-born residents and their offspring account for more than 55 percent of the city's population. More than 43 percent of the foreign-born arrived after 1990, and 80 percent after 1980.

The same dynamic that New York experienced then is now under way in the 31 counties of the metropolitan region, the report said, especially in Hudson, Passaic, Union, Middlesex, Bergen and Essex in New Jersey and Westchester in New York, which all count the foreign-born as more than one-fifth of their populations.

Increasingly, some immigrant groups, like Jamaicans and Haitians, are bypassing the city and settling directly in adjacent counties, drawn to housing vacated by aging European immigrants of earlier migrations and their children.

"New York City is as much a process as a place," the report said of these crosscurrents.

What Mr. Salvo called the report's "wall-to-wall statistics" conveyed a strikingly mixed bag of socioeconomic factors, with some large groups, like Dominicans and Mexicans, far below the city's median education and earnings, and others, like Filipinos and Indians, far above it. In many groups, high rates of homeownership coexist with high rates of overcrowding - 42.2 percent of Chinese households are owner-occupied, for example, and 34.2 percent are overcrowded, compared with citywide rates of 30.3 and 14.6 percent respectively.

Just over one in four foreign-born Dominicans has completed high school, and only 30 percent speak English very well. Nearly a third are in poverty, compared with a citywide rate of 21 percent, and 18.6 percent of households are on public assistance, compared with 7.5 percent for all residents.

Though Mexicans had the city's lowest median earnings ($16,737 for women, $21,284 for men) and lowest levels of education (slightly more than a third graduated from high school), they managed to bring their household incomes to 85 percent of the city median of $37,700, by having multiple workers in overcrowded households.

That was a strategy used even by highly educated foreign-born groups like the city's 49,600 Filipinos, at the other end of the spectrum. Median female earning among Filipinos was $51,000, and median household income $70,500, both the highest of any immigrant group. Though there are only 60 Filipino men to every 100 Filipino women, the Filipino poverty rate is only 5.3 percent, a fourth the citywide rate of 21 percent; only 2 percent receive public assistance.

"There is no typical New York immigrant," Mr. Salvo said. The report assembles an intricate mosaic of facts to support that assertion, from the highest rates of homeownership (Italians, 64 percent) to the most skewed sex ratio (161 Pakistani men to every 100 Pakistani women). Its combination of maps and tables pinpoint the whereabouts of the top 40 immigrant groups, from the 90,336 Dominicans in Washington Heights, to the five French immigrants settled in the Great Kills Zip code on Staten Island.

"The level of complexity and diversity is beyond anything we've had in our history," Mr. Salvo said. "We've evolved into a city that's just an unprecedented mix. And for the most part all these people get along - it's a testament to the power of the city."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/01/23/nyregion/20050124_IMMIG.gif

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[billyblancoNYC]

I would love to know, though, how many people moved from the city BECAUSE of these new immigrants. This is never taken into account, as it would be very difficult to prove. It just bothers me a bit when they make it seem like there would be 5 million people in NYC if it weren't for the immigrants.

Also, will there be a trend of more immigrants being let in from Central and Eastern Europe, etc.?

[NewYorkYankee]

Another reason I love NY. The diversity is amazing.

[Kris]

The Newest New Yorkers 2000 (http://nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/nny.html)

[ZippyTheChimp]

January 30, 2005

Around the World in 5 Boroughs

By JOSEPH BERGER
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/i.gifn a growing number of New York City neighborhoods, it is English that is the foreign language.

"The Newest New Yorkers 2000," a 265-page report released last week on how immigration has transformed the city's landscape and life, counted 17 neighborhoods where a majority of the residents were born outside the United States.

In one, Elmhurst in Queens, seven out of 10 residents were born abroad. A stranger stepping out of the neighborhood's subway exit at 75th Street and Broadway would quickly see a large sign proclaiming "Learn English" at the entrance to the American Language Communication Center. There, 1,200 people a week take English classes, some to achieve something as modest as advancing to waiter from busboy.

On that block and the next, a beauty parlor is Indian, a money transmission shop is Ecuadorean, a bakery and Seventh-Day Adventist Church are Chinese, and a video store and dry cleaner are Korean. The owner of Bollywood Beauty Salon Karim Budhwani, an Indian Muslim from Bombay, has learned a smattering of Spanish so he can intelligently give a corte de pelo (a haircut) to a Latino customer. He is also proud that for three years he has employed a Jew from the former Soviet Union, Alex Arkadiy, as a hair stylist.

"People wonder why being a Muslim guy, I keep a Jewish guy," Mr. Budhwani said. "He is the only one who stayed this long."

If he is nonchalant about how cosmopolitan his shop is, perhaps it's because Elmhurst's polyglot character has become commonplace for much of the city, even in neighborhoods not previously known for their diversity. Several communities have been refashioned by the immigrant tide that gave New York City 2.9 million foreign-born residents in 2000 compared with 2.1 million in 1990.

Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, once so inherently third- and fourth-generation Italian-American that the character of Tony Manero and his family were based there in the 1977 film classic "Saturday Night Fever," now have a population that is 40 percent foreign born. One-fifth of that foreign-born population of 78,585 residents are from China, while Russians and Ukrainians also abound, and immigrants from Italy make up only 11 percent. Woodside and Sunnyside in Queens were once Irish bastions, but now, 6 out of 10 residents were born abroad in countries like Bangladesh, China, Colombia and Ecuador.

The report also suggested that the places where immigrants choose to settle are now more blended than ever. The ethnic history of New York has been characterized by a checkerboard, with Italians tending to live in Italian neighborhoods, Jews in Jewish neighborhoods, and so on. But the report found neighborhoods where a stew would be a more apt metaphor.

Of the 74,639 foreign-born residents of Elmhurst, 19 percent came from China, 12 percent from Colombia, 11.7 percent from Ecuador, 8.4 percent from Mexico, 7.1 percent from Korea, 5.6 percent from India and 5.2 percent from the Philippines. The exotic flavor would have been portrayed as even richer if the census had included children born here to immigrant parents among its count.

There were many counterintuitive findings. The southern tier of Brooklyn, places like Bay Ridge, Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay and Canarsie that once formed an unshakable swath of homeowners of various European ancestries, has become far more emblematic of the globe, said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division of the city planning department, who wrote the report with Arun Peter Lobo. The three ZIP codes that make up Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge are home to the largest number of immigrants in Brooklyn, 78,600, the report said.

"A critical mass is building in this part of Brooklyn," Mr. Salvo said. "It means it's becoming a very diverse immigrant enclave."

Other neighborhoods are also becoming more cosmopolitan. Bedford-Stuyvesant, long identified as black American, had 16,200 residents who were born abroad, about 28 percent. Most were Caribbean blacks from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. While Borough Park has long been depicted as Hasidic, the report found that it has 35,900 immigrants, one-fifth of whom are Chinese. Park Slope may be identified with brownstone-dwelling children of privilege, but it has 18,700 immigrants, 11 percent of whom are Mexicans.

While Manhattan's largest immigrant group is Dominican, making Washington Heights the city's largest immigrant enclave with 90,336 newcomers, the report found that the borough had large groups of people from countries barely represented elsewhere in the city - Canada, Cuba, Germany and the United Kingdom. Many are diplomats, students and other more transient foreigners.

Despite the amalgamated example of Elmhurst, the report found that many newer immigrants still choose to live among compatriots, at least at first. Guyanese immigrants are settling in Richmond Hill, Queens, once a heavily German and Irish enclave that saw its immigrant population double during the 1990's. People from the Caribbean countries of Guyana (17,555) and Trinidad and Tobago (4,975) now predominate, and almost all are descendants of contract laborers who left India for the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

By contrast, the Lower East Side, the paragon of immigrant neighborhoods from an earlier era, is now a place where four out of every five residents were born in this country, a consequence of the fact that Latino immigrants have lived there for more than a generation, Mr. Salvo said. Other factors are an influx of American-born bohemians into the tenements and the presence of a largely Orthodox Jewish enclave in the co-ops near the East River.

The immigrant wave touched every corner of the city. The Bronx has not only had surges of Dominicans moving from apartments in Washington Heights to those in Highbridge, but Jamaicans now make up almost a quarter of the residents of Wakefield, a northeastern neighborhood of one- and two-family homes. Even Staten Island, the whitest of the city's boroughs, has changed. Neighborhoods like New Springville have large numbers of Koreans, Indians and Chinese, and New Brighton-Grymes Hill is home to 8,000 Mexicans.

None of these trends surprise Mr. Budhwani, the Elmhurst hair salon owner.

"Every stranger can stay in New York City and feel more comfortable here than in any other state," he said.


Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Kris]

Immigrant City (http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/immigrants/20050131/11/1312)

[Kris]

January 30, 2005

How Q Found Her Groove

By JIRO ADACHI

Slide Show: Japanese Immigrants in New York City (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2005/01/29/nyregion/20050130_FEAT_SLIDESHOW_1.html)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/h.gifER arm locks like a robot's, then pops from the shoulder, sending a wave through her body. Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" blares from a boombox in the Times Square subway station as a crowd of onlookers, heads bobbing, cheer on the performer.

The break dancer is female, which is unusual enough. Even more eye-opening is the fact that she is a 26-year-old Japanese woman with cornrows in Float Committee, the crew of young African-American men with whom she is performing on this day.

Her solo builds as she glides around the concrete floor, limbs electric, torso fluttering as if from some subterranean wind. In another instant, she is back in line with her crew, grinning and rocking to and fro as sweat pours down her face.

To her family in the city of Nagoya, she is Kumi Naito. In her New York life and in the break-dance world, she is simply Q, and a wild departure from the stereotype of the Japanese immigrant, or issei, that New Yorkers have known in the past: the salaryman from a Japanese corporation with a wife in tow.

Q also typifies how the Japanese immigrant of today - young, artistically inclined, open to risks and twice as likely to be female than male - differs from the bulk of immigrants to New York, who come to take advantage of the city's economic opportunities.

These Big Apple Issei, as they could be called, are cultural refugees, drawn to New York's creative clamor and in search of freedom for their spirits.

This was certainly true of Q, who is thrilled to be able to pursue her passion for dancing on the streets and in the city's subway stations; she even tours the country and Europe with a professional company.

For her, this independence is everything. "I can't imagine being in Japan," she said. "I couldn't break dance there."

A Place for Purple Hair

In the last two decades, thousands of young Japanese like Q have come to New York in search of the custom-tailored lifestyles that are hard to carve out in a homeland, where johshiki - traditional ways and morality - still exert a powerful influence. Such young people make up the majority of their fellow countrymen, or rather, countrywomen, living in the city.

Census data from 2000 show that 63 percent of the 16,516 foreign-born Japanese living in New York are women, and 64 percent are 20 to 39 years old. That percentage of young people is nearly 23 percentage points higher than it is for Chinese or Koreans, the two largest Asian immigrant groups in the city.

Hiroko Kazama, who is 42 and came to the city in 1987, said that young Japanese, especially artistic types, come to New York because they find that other American cities are too much like Japan. "Japanese society doesn't have an understanding for art," explained Ms. Kazama, who lives in the East Village and works for City Lore, an urban folklore center on East First Street. "Traditional art is accepted, but edgy art is not. Hair that's red and purple is hard to accept. Young people are not comfortable with that."

This is probably an understatement; young Japanese have ample cause for wanting out. As early as fourth grade, many are sent to jukus - cram schools - to begin preparing for the country's highly competitive college entrance exams. A child's mother packs up two bento boxes each morning, one for lunch and one for dinner. When the regular school day is over at 3, the children are off to jukus, where they work until 10 p.m.

University years often provide the only break in a rigid educational regimen, because students need only to do well on final exams to pass their classes. But the rigid life track continues once they graduate from a university or junior college. They are expected to get jobs, working as salarymen or O.L.'s - office ladies - where they stay, sometimes for a lifetime.

Japan has certainly benefited from this kind of rigor, and perhaps this is why, even with a shrinking population, the country is continually ranked among the top 10 nations in terms of gross domestic product. But for those who remain on the career track, the prospect of "finding your bliss" often becomes bleaker with each passing year. Koji Toyama, a photography major at Parsons School of Design who came to New York in 2000 and now lives in Williamsburg, put it simply: "Young people in Japan don't care about the future."

Women, especially, encounter stiff obstacles to forging their own path in Japan. Not only do they have a harder time developing professionally in a male-dominated society, they often face harsh judgments if they choose not to become a wife and mother at an early age.

"If you are an unmarried woman older than 25," said Jun Takama, a 41-year-old who has lived in New York, mostly in Chelsea, since 1996, "people refer to you as Niju-go nichi sugita Kurisumasu keiki." Translation: you're a Christmas cake, because no one wants you after "25."

Not wanting to be hemmed in by such conventional notions of how to live her life, Ms. Takama has remained in New York, where she finds it easier to pursue her personal and professional interests. She has worked as a hairstylist and wants to set up a cross-cultural consulting service for Japanese women coming to the city. When she spent a year as an O.L. at All Nippon Airways, in an office based at Kennedy Airport, she still felt confined by the strictures of Japan. Although she felt as if she performed better than some of her male colleagues, it seemed to her that they found it easier to move up.

Many men she worked with also treated her as if she barely existed, she said. When she arrived at work on a typical morning, for example, the men would already be ensconced in their Yomiuri or Asahi Shimbun newspapers.

"Good morning," Ms. Takama trilled, imitating herself as the chipper O.L. arriving just in time to make coffee. "But the men only respond with a grunt."

"When I got my hair cut short," she added, "the only comment I got was 'What are you trying to do, outdo us?' "

The Language of Adaptation

Simply coming to New York, of course, doesn't guarantee success, and the path to happiness here is as fraught with complications and pitfalls for young Japanese as for any immigrant. And though the first obstacle for many of them is the language barrier, learning English often helps them ease into the city's multicultural stew, and in fact can be a ticket to self-discovery.

In English-language classrooms around the city, Big Apple Issei mix with Latin Americans, Africans, Europeans and other Asians. At many private language schools and those attached to universities, Japanese students typically make up about 30 percent of the student body.

Caitlin Morgan, assistant director of the English language studies department at the New School, has noticed the physical transformations that many Japanese undergo while they are studying English: they change hair colors, get tattoos, acquire multiple piercings, use hair extensions and grow dreadlocks.

Even without these extreme changes, the physical changes are visually dramatic. "The women especially," she explained, "their voices seem to get deeper, they put on a little weight and become fitter, they use less makeup, they become a little realer."

"These foreign explorers," she added, "seem to have an intuitive understanding that in New York, there are rewards to taking creative risks and trying new things."

Sometimes, a student's interests become a vehicle for personal change that would have been impossible in Japan. One afternoon, Ms. Morgan was advising a student who was so smitten with hip-hop culture, if you closed your eyes and listened to him talk, you'd have thought you were listening to a black hip-hop artist.

"I always got my rhymes in my head," the student said with a grin, hands splayed, " 'cause on the mike I gotta sound fly."

Learning English also paved the way for 26-year-old Sayuri Tsuchitani, who felt the lure of the city all the way from her rural town of Anabuki on the island of Shikoku. New York, she said, had a "buzz kind of thing." She heard that it was dangerous here, that "you could get killed." And so, she added with a gleam in her eye, "I wanted to check it out."

Attending Rennert Bilingual, a private language school, became the first stop on her road to independence and a job as a hairstylist, a career she had always yearned to pursue. After two years of full-time English study, her language skills were strong enough to allow her to enroll in Libs Beauty School in Midtown. Her defining moment came when she got work as a hairstylist at Damian West, a salon at Waverly Place and 10th Street.

"That was my real breakthrough," Ms. Tsuchitani said. "That and having really great, cool clients."

She often visited with local musicians and singers who came to the salon and turned her on to the neighborhood's jazz hot spots, like the Village Vanguard and Sweet Basil. As she trimmed hair one afternoon recently, she chatted animatedly about two concerts she attended recently at Irving Plaza - the metal band, Gwar, and the Afro-European music group, Zap Mama.

Ms. Tsuchitani now works at a Japanese-owned hair salon, Hair Kuwayama, on East 10th Street. Since 10 percent of the clients are Japanese, the salon needs bilingual employees, and Ms. Tsuchitani finds herself in the position of being an American-trained stylist working with other Big Apple Issei who underwent the more rigorous training that stylists receive in Japan.

"They can do anything," she said admiringly of her colleagues. "They blow my mind. I'm learning a lot from them."

Daifuku Meets Bagel

While the city has no real Japanese enclave, the largest percentage of them - 16 percent, according to census data - live in the Stuyvesant Town-Turtle Bay area. But it is in the East Village that young Japanese are especially visible.

The area bounded by East Ninth Street, Stuyvesant Street and Second and Third Avenues has become what some call Little Tokyo or J-Town, because it is so easy to get a fix of daifuku, a traditional pastry, and okonomiyaki, an Osakan-style seafood pancake. The venerable Sunrise Mart on East Ninth Street is stocked with Japanese delicacies, groceries and housewares. St. Mark's Place from Third Avenue to Avenue A is home to no fewer than nine Japanese restaurants as well as a new Japanese convenience store.

Hang around these places for even a little while, and you will see a full range of Big Apple Issei - reggae punks with dreadlocks tucked into knitted tams the colors of the Jamaican flag, hipsters smoking behind oversized shades, pairs of chatty young women with dainty shopping bags hanging from their arms.

Despite its flavors of home, Little Tokyo is no Japan. That is exactly the point for cultural refugees like Hanako Shimamoto, 37, who has lived in New York since 1992 and does not miss the constriction of her birthplace. She spends her days as a floral designer at Fantasia, a secret garden of a store on East 74th Street that is nestled on the ground floor of a two-story brick building. She left her native land, she said, because "in Japan, I could never go beyond my world."

Ms. Shimamoto, whose open smile shows no hint of the reserve typical of Japanese women, was born in Kyoto, a city renowned for its traditional beauty and customs, and a place where, Ms. Shimamoto said, "your neighbor knows everything about you."

"But at the same time," she added, "people don't talk much. They want to hide their emotions."

Here in New York, she enjoys the unexpected in her conversations. Because her employers are Catholics, their talks include God and religion, two topics that are conversational taboos in Japan. "In New York," she said, "you open a door to a different level of being with people."

When she was working in Japan at a factory that manufactured dental equipment, Ms. Shimamoto bristled at the routine of going out after work with colleagues for food, drink and small talk. So she went to the gym or took English lessons. Then she got interested in floral design. "But everyone was getting into it then," she said, "so I decided to come to the States to study."

She felt an especially strong connection to New York, and took an apartment in Woodside, Queens. Like many New Yorkers, she chose her neighborhood for the affordable rent, but she doesn't hang out there. In her free time, she wanders around Manhattan, particularly the West Village. Her favorite New York delicacy? The bagel, of course.

"It's hard to explain," Ms. Shimamoto said with a laugh as she put the finishing touches on a birthday bouquet of yellow, salmon and spray roses. "But my intuition just told me that this was the right place for me to be."

In the end, even New York may not be big enough for some Big Apple Issei. Many aspire to become citizens of the world who can travel, work and live in a variety of locations. They are modern people born of an extremely traditional culture. This koan-like paradox is most clearly evident in the fact that, unlike their predecessors, most of these young Japanese immigrants are not trying to become United States citizens. They like being Japanese; they simply prefer to live in New York.

So they visit Japan at least once a year. And while they admit that once there, they again feel the claustrophobia of being in a conservative, homogeneous culture, they also relish the comforts of the familiar in the form of family, friends, language, food, and being around people who, unlike many New Yorkers, go out of their way to be polite.

Q is typical in that she returns to Japan once a year. But when she describes what she does during her stay, she sounds like the New York artist she is: "I just try to chill."

Jiro Adachi is the author of the novel "The Island of Bicycle Dancers."

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Kris]

February 21, 2005

More Africans Enter U.S. Than in Days of Slavery

By SAM ROBERTS

Slide Show (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2005/02/20/nyregion/20050221_AFRI_SLIDESHOW_1.html)

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/f.gifor the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade.

Since 1990, according to immigration figures, more have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807. More have been coming here annually - about 50,000 legal immigrants - than in any of the peak years of the middle passage across the Atlantic, and more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries.

New York State draws the most; Nigeria and Ghana are among the top 20 sources of immigrants to New York City. But many have moved to metropolitan Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Houston. Pockets of refugees, especially Somalis, have found havens in Minnesota, Maine and Oregon.

The movement is still a trickle compared with the number of newcomers from Latin America and Asia, but it is already redefining what it means to be African-American. The steady decline in the percentage of African-Americans with ancestors who suffered directly through the middle passage and Jim Crow is also shaping the debate over affirmative action, diversity programs and other initiatives intended to redress the legacy of slavery.

In Africa, the flow is contributing to a brain drain. But at the same time, African-born residents of the United States are sharing their relative prosperity here by sending more than $1 billion annually back to their families and friends.

"Basically, people are coming to reclaim the wealth that's been taken from their countries," said Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, which has just inaugurated an exhibition, Web site and book, titled "In Motion," to commemorate the African diaspora.

The influx has other potential implications, from recalibrating the largely monolithic way white America views blacks to raising concerns that American-born blacks will again be left behind.

"Historically, every immigrant group has jumped over American-born blacks," said Eric Foner, the Columbia University historian. "The final irony would be if African immigrants did, too."

The flow from Africa began in the 1970's, mostly with refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia, and escalated in the 1990's, when the number of black residents of the United States born in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled. Combined with the much larger flow of Caribbean blacks, the recent arrivals from Africa accounted for about 25 percent of black population growth in the United States over all during the decade. Nationally, the proportion of blacks who are foreign born rose to about 7.3 percent from 4.9 percent in the 1990's. In New York City, about 1 in 3 blacks are foreign born.

According to the census, the proportion of black people living in the United States who describe themselves as African-born, while still small, more than doubled in the 1990's, to 1.7 percent from about 0.8 percent, for a total estimated conservatively at more than 600,000. About 1.7 million United States residents identify their ancestry as sub-Saharan.

Those numbers reflect only legal immigrants, who have been arriving at the rate of about 50,000 a year, first mostly as refugees and students and more recently through family reunification and diversity visas. Many speak English, were raised in large cities and capitalist economies, live in families headed by married couples and are generally more highly educated and have higher-paying jobs than American-born blacks.

There is no official count of the many others who entered the country illegally or have overstayed their visas and who are likely to be less well off.

Kim Nichols, co-executive director of the African Services Committee, which directs newcomers to health care, housing and other services in the New York region, estimates that the number of illegal African immigrants dwarfs the legal ones. "We think it's a multiple of at least four," she said.

Africans' reasons for coming echo the aspirations of earlier immigrants.

"Senegal became too small," said Marie Lopy, who arrived as a student in 1996, worked as a bookkeeper in a restaurant and earned an associate degree in biology from the City University of New York.

After winning a place in an American immigration lottery that his secretary had entered for him in 1994, Daouda Ndiaye recalls being persuaded by his six children to leave Senegal, where he was working as a financial manager. "I said, 'I'm 45, I'd have to build a whole new life, I'd have to go to school to learn English,' " he recalled. "They said, 'We want you to go and we want you to send for us because there's more opportunity in the U.S. than here.' "

His wife and two of his children have joined him in the United States, where he has worked as a sporting goods store manager and is now a translator.

That the latest movement of black Africans arriving voluntarily surpasses the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking is a bit of a statistical anomaly. That total, most historians now agree, was about 500,000, with an annual peak of perhaps 30,000, compared with the millions overall who were sold into slavery from Africa. Many died aboard ship. Most were transported to the Caribbean and Brazil, where they were vulnerable to indigenous diseases and to the rigors of raising sugar cane, which was harder to cultivate than cotton or rice, the predominant crops on plantations in the United States, where the slave population was better able to survive and reproduce.

Moreover, black Africans represented a much higher proportion of the population then than they do today. In 1800, about 20 percent of the 5 million or so people in the United States were black. Among nearly 300 million Americans today, about 13 percent are black.

Still, with Europe increasingly inhospitable and much of Africa still suffering from the ravages of drought and the AIDS epidemic and the vagaries of economic mismanagement, the number migrating to the United States is growing - despite the reluctance of some Africans to come face to face with the effects of centuries of enduring discrimination.

In the 1960's, 28,954 legal immigrants were admitted from all of Africa, a figure that rose geometrically to 80,779 in the 1970's, 176,893 in the 1980's and 354,939 in the 1990's. In 2002, 60,269 were admitted, including 8,291 from Nigeria, 7,574 from Ethiopia, 4,537 from Somalia, 4,256 from Ghana and 3,207 from Kenya.

To many Americans, the most visible signs of the movement are the proliferation of African churches, mosques, hair-braiding salons, street vendors and supermarket deliverymen, the controversy over female genital mutilation and the election last year of Barack Obama, son of a native Kenyan, to the United States Senate from Illinois. Especially in New York City, the shooting deaths of two unarmed African immigrants, Amadou Diallo from Guinea in 1999 and Ousmane Zongo from Burkina Faso in 2003, come to mind.

Immigrants arrive with their own perceptions and expectations, from countries where blacks constitute a majority at every level of society, only to discover that whether they are professors or peddlers, they may be lumped together here by whites and even by American-born blacks.

"You have the positive impact that race is not seen to be an absolute definer of people's opportunities," Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, said, "but that begs the larger question of what does it mean to have a black skin in the United States."

Agba Mangalabou, who arrived from Togo in 2002, recalls his surprise when he moved here from Europe. "In Germany, everyone knew I was African," he said. "Here, nobody knows if I'm African or American."

Ms. Lopy, who now works as a medical interpreter for the African Services Committee, describes herself as "African, first and foremost," though the identity of her children will depend on whom she marries and where. "I'll raise them to be African-something," she said, "but ultimately they'll define it for themselves."

Sylviane A. Diouf, a historian and researcher at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center and Dr. Dodson's co-author of "In Motion," said that Americans have a more positive view of immigrants in general than they do of American-born blacks. Referring to African immigrants, she said: "They are better educated, they're here to work, to prosper, they're more compliant and don't pose a threat."

Dr. Dodson added, "They're not politically mobilized as yet and not as closely tied to the African-American agenda."

While the ancestors of most Caribbean-born blacks were enslaved, and slavery also victimized the forbears of many African-born blacks, the growing proportion of immigrants may further complicate the debate over programs envisioned to redress the legacies of slavery.

"I think there is a legitimate set of specific claims by persons born in the United States that don't necessarily apply to Caribbean or African populations that have come here subsequently," Dr. Dodson said.

"African-born and Caribbean-born brothers and sisters have realized that the police don't discriminate on the basis of nationality - ask Amadou Diallo," said Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., who teaches at Harvard Law School and has warned colleges and universities that admitting mostly foreign-born blacks to meet the goals of affirmative action is insufficient.

"Whether you are from Brazil or from Cuba, you are still products of slavery," he continued. "But the threshold is that people of African descent who were born and raised and suffered in America have to be the first among equals."

French-speaking Haitians do not necessarily mix with English-speaking West Indians, much less with Africans, and competition for jobs has been another source of tension.

"The Africans tend to be quite industrious and entrepreneurial and often take advantage of opportunities that might have been here for others before," said Kim Nichols of the African Services Committee.

"We're talking about very profoundly different cultures," Kathleen Newland said.

Analyses by the Department of City Planning, and by the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, in Albany found recent immigrants often segregated from other blacks. The census found Nigerian clusters in Flatlands and Canarsie in Brooklyn and Ghanaians in Morris Heights and High Bridge in the Bronx.

"As with European ethnics at the turn of the century," Joseph J. Salvo, the director of the population division of the Department of City Planning, and Arun Peter Lobo, the deputy director, wrote recently, "ethnicity has been a powerful force in shaping black residential settlement in New York."

Immigration may also shift some of the nation's focus from racial distinctions to ethnic ones. "Certainly, South Africa showed us that minority status does not necessarily correlate to one's position in society, but rather that power and its uses are the issues," said Samuel K. Roberts of Columbia, a history professor who is also on the faculty of the university's Institute for Research in African-American Studies. "That being said, increasingly distinguishing between black Americans and black Africans may produce conditions in which we will be less prone to think of a fictional construct of 'race' as the distinguishing factor among all of us in North America."

How long might those distinctions last? "I guess one of the questions will have to be what happens in the next generation or two," said Professor Foner of Columbia. "In America, marriage is the great solvent. Are they going to melt into the African-American population? Most likely yes."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/02/20/nyregion/20050221_AFRICA_GRAPHIC.gif

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[TLOZ Link5]

So now, in addition to having more Jews than Jerusalem, more Irish than Dublin, more Puerto Ricans than San Juan and more Catholics than Rome, New York has more Jamaicans than Montego Bay, more Dominicans than anywhere outside of Santo Domingo, more Guyanese than anywhere outside of Georgetown, and more Trinidadians than San Fernando and Port of Spain combined.

[alex ballard]

So now, in addition to having more Jews than Jerusalem, more Irish than Dublin, more Puerto Ricans than San Juan and more Catholics than Rome, New York has more Jamaicans than Montego Bay, more Dominicans than anywhere outside of Santo Domingo, more Guyanese than anywhere outside of Georgetown, and more Trinidadians than San Fernando and Port of Spain combined.

Does NY still have a large Jewish, Italian and Irish popualtions?

I'm glad to see immigrants coming to NY. My question is A) are they here to stay? B) do they like NY and are they faring well? and C) are their children going to stay here?

[TLOZ Link5]

About one in ten of every New Yorkers is Jewish, and 9% of the population is Irish. Italians count for around 8% of the population.

[alex ballard]

About one in ten of every New Yorkers is Jewish, and 9% of the population is Irish. Italians count for around 8% of the population.

Is it true that all three of those etnicites will eventually not really be a factor in the city(as in everyone of these peoples will move out)? Or are they eventually going to stablize and grow? I miss the old Italian, Irish and Jewish nabes.

[Schadenfrau]

There's far more integration today than there was in previous generations. Also, there's far less of an incentive for Europeans to move to America.

[TLOZ Link5]

In the 1950s, one in every four New Yorkers was Jewish. Now, it's more like every one in ten, as a large portion of the Jewish population has moved elsewhere: the suburbs, the Sunbelt, Florida, etc.

Little Italy in Manhattan is more of a tourist attraction than a real, Italian neighborhood. Not many Italian-Americans actually live there anymore.

Ethnic neighborhoods come and go as the demographics change and new faces move in; it's inevitable, and the change can be welcomed or mourned as befits your opinion. Harlem was German until the turn of last century, as was Yorkville for many, many generations. As I've said before, Radio Row, which the World Trade Center replaced, was once a neighborhood of Syrian immigrants, the descendants of whom still owned shops in the area.

[NewYorkYankee]

Ethnic neighborhoods come and go as the demographics change and new faces move in

This is another great thing about NY, its always changing.

[Kris]

March 3, 2005

Study Paints Clearer Picture of Mexicans in City

By NINA BERNSTEIN (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=NINA%20BERNSTEIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=NINA%20BERNSTEIN&inline=nyt-per)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/f.gifrom new church shrines and revamped bodegas to rising birthrates, Mexican migration is transforming Hispanic New York in patterns more typical of other American cities. Yet because so many of the recent migrants are here illegally, there has been little demographic information about them.

Yesterday, however, new details emerged from an unusual study of nearly 5,000 Mexican migrants seeking identity documents at Mexican consulates in seven cities, including New York. Those surveyed in New York were more likely to say they were in the country illegally, to be under 30 and to be employed in hotels and restaurants than the applicants surveyed in other cities where Mexican settlement has a longer history.

Though the study, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, was not random or weighted to represent all Mexican migrants, it offers the best view yet of an elusive population, Roberto Suro, the center's director, said yesterday.

Those surveyed were not questioned directly about their immigration status, but they were asked whether they had any form of photo identification issued by a government agency in the United States. Slightly more than half around the country, and 75 percent in New York, said they did not.

All were at the consulates applying for a matricula consular, a laminated identity card issued by Mexican officials that bears the applicant's name and home address in the United States while attesting to Mexican citizenship. It cannot serve as a work or residence permit in the United States, but it can be used to open bank accounts, and in some states - though not New York - to establish identity for a driver's license.

The young, disproportionately male newcomers waiting for their paperwork to be processed were a captive audience for the study's 12-page questionnaire, Mr. Suro said, observing that the Mexican government cooperated with the effort, conducted from July to the end of January.

Those surveyed are better educated than the average adult population of Mexico, the study found. Two thirds have more than a primary school education, compared with a quarter of those in Mexico and 60 percent of all Mexicans in the United States. But they fall far short of American educational achievement, with only 28 percent having completed high school or more, compared with 87 percent of all United States residents. And more than half speak little or no English.

Asked how long they expected to remain in the United States, a majority of respondents said they planned to stay indefinitely or for the rest of their lives. But by a 4-to-1 margin they said they would take part in a temporary worker program requiring them to return to Mexico, and by a 6-to-1 margin they said such a guest worker program would appeal to their friends and relatives in Mexico.

"There is some conflict," Mr. Suro said, observing that the longer migrants have lived in the United States, and the older they are, the more likely they are to say they want to stay. Women were more likely than men to say they wanted to stay, he added, because many were joining their husbands in a second-wave migration.

Mexicans are by far the largest foreign-born group in the United States but only the fifth-largest immigrant group in New York, a recent City Planning Department study showed. Their census numbers quadrupled to 122,550 in the decade from 1990-99, when they ranked 17th with 32,689. City demographers said the true growth was still higher, possibly to a total of 200,000. Births to the city's Mexican-born mothers - 6,408 in 2000 - were second only to births to foreign-born Dominicans, who are the largest immigrant group in the city, with 369,000, followed by Chinese, Jamaicans and Guyanese.

Mexican government officials, who are pushing for a guest worker proposal made by President Bush, were quick to seize on the Pew Hispanic Center study as support for the president's proposal.

But others said that just as many of those surveyed said they would like to take part in a program leading to permanent residence in the United States.

"The illegals themselves recognize that the president's proposal is going to end up being permanent," said Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates restricting immigration.

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Kris]

April 3, 2006
2 Cities, 2 Approaches to Immigrants
By JOYCE PURNICK

THEY marched across the Brooklyn Bridge by the thousands on Saturday, carrying signs, pushing baby carriages, waving flags, enjoying the April warmth. A typical demonstration in New York — a week late.

The first major demonstration in the old melting pot against proposed immigration legislation took place a week after a protest in Los Angeles. And the turnout, though large, was modest compared with the more than half a million who marched in Los Angeles and the tens of thousands who marched in other cities recently.

New York, which likes to think it is different even when it isn't, sometimes really is. In many ways, Los Angeles and New York City are similar. From 35 percent to 38 percent of each metropolitan region is foreign-born.

But California, which shares a border with Mexico and has more undocumented immigrants than New York does, harbors a longstanding unease about immigrants. New York considers immigrants central to its vitality.

Joseph Salvo, director of the City Planning Department's population division, has pointed out that immigrants compensate for population losses. "If we didn't have immigration, I don't know where we'd be," he said last year when he and a colleague issued a report on the city's diversity.

That's another main contrast: New York's immigrants make up an international stew while Los Angeles's immigrants are largely Mexican — citizens and noncitizens who share a history and a culture and have become a political force.

No immigrant group dominates in New York. The largest segment of the city's 3.2 million foreign-born is Dominican, with an estimated 369,000 people, followed by Chinese (261,500). There are Jamaicans, Guyanese, Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Koreans, Filipinos, Irish, Colombians, Russians — to name just some.

The city's Puerto Ricans — 789,000 in the 2000 census — are citizens, so they would not be affected by the proposed legislation.

"Here, you can't have a strategy where you get one dominant group to guarantee 500,000 people because we're so diverse," said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. "You almost have to do what they did in the Mexican community in Los Angeles, with 10 different communities."

What they did in Los Angeles was mobilize, encouraged by Spanish-speaking radio personalities, labor leaders and Roman Catholic clergy. Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles vehemently attacked a House bill that would make it a federal crime to offer aid to illegal immigrants and pledged a campaign of civil disobedience if it became law.

Cardinal Edward M. Egan of the Archdiocese of New York has not spoken out on the subject, though an archdiocese spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said yesterday that in a recent news release the cardinal urged Congress to address immigration reform in a "fair and humane" way.

CARDINAL Mahony's remarks drew national attention, and Los Angeles's Latino radio hosts — who play an influential role not mirrored in New York — drew crowds, using the airwaves to encourage listeners to demonstrate.

Poor, illegal immigrants don't have an easy time in New York, where many cope with low wages and crowded, substandard housing. Some encounter bias, especially beyond the city, in eastern Long Island.

But clearly the political climate in New York is more accepting than it is in California. The mayor of Los Angeles and California's governor are generally supportive of immigrants, but statewide ballot initiatives have outlawed affirmative action in public universities and bilingual education in public schools and the public voted to cut off state-financed services to illegal immigrants.

New York's policies and politics are so immigrant-friendly that if former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani runs for president, he'll have to explain his pro-immigrant record to Republican hard-liners.

"New York is a lot more friendly to immigrants, while out there they've mobilized to fight battles," said Nancy Rosas, a California native, at the Brooklyn end of New York's demonstration as she passed Irish and Salvadoran construction workers on a break, cheering on the marchers.

Most of the protesters probably did not realize that, as David B. Caruso of The Associated Press wrote, they marched from a Brooklyn neighborhood settled by the Dutch across a bridge designed by a German immigrant and rallied near Chinatown in an area that once held Irish slums.

Along the way, as they crossed the bridge built by Irish, Italian and German immigrant workers, they got a great view of the Statue of Liberty.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company