By Bernadette Zumoff, age 11
There are 3.1 million immigrants in New York City. According to the Center for Migration Studies, 38% of the city’s population are foreign-born.
Today, New York City’s largest immigrant groups are from the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, and Ecuador. Most of New York City’s immigrants speak Spanish, English, Chinese, Russian, and Bengali. One hundred eighty languages are spoken in New York City.
Most immigrants work as care aides, taxi drivers, and construction workers, according to a report by the Center for Migration Studies.
Some immigrants have different legal statuses. Undocumented immigrants have a higher percentage of labor force participation than native-born New Yorkers, but they get paid less than the native-born New Yorkers.
A mixed-status household is when someone in a household is undocumented and others are not. According to the Center for Migration Studies, one out of six children live in a mixed household in New York City. One out of 11 U.S. citizen children live with an undocumented parent.
Immigrants started arriving in New York City in large numbers in the mid-1800s. Why did they leave their countries? The Bedtime History podcast explains that many Irish people left their country for New York because of a famine, while Germans left for political causes. In the late 1800s, eastern and southern Europeans, especially Italians and Jewish people, started arriving. Jewish immigrants came to New York City to avoid persecution—which means being killed—from Russia and Eastern Europe. Puerto Ricans started arriving in New York City in the mid-1900s.
Ellis Island opened in 1892 because the previous location got too full to process the number of immigrants who were arriving. Between 1892 and 1954, 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. On an average busy day, 5,000 to 10,000 immigrants passed through Ellis Island, according to Bedtime History.
Life for New York immigrants in this time period was really tough. Most lived in small apartments called tenements and did not get paid enough money.
In 1924, “federal immigration quotas … reduced the flood of newcomers to a trickle,” reports PBS. This changed when the Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965, when America let in more immigrants. Lots of newcomers came in the 1970s and 1980s from many countries, such as China, Mexico, Greece, and Turkey, according to PBS.
“In the year 2000, the Census Bureau reported that the city’s population—after shrinking for decades—had shot up by more than 700,000 people in less than a decade, topping the eight million mark for the first time in its history,” reports PBS.
This topic is important to know about because a lot of New York’s population is made up of immigrants. Immigrant history is a central part of New York City’s history.
