New York migration demographics - an interactive portrait
Built by arrivals, remade by generations
For two centuries New Yorkers have arrived, built, raised children who moved on, and handed the city to the next wave. This dashboard traces who they were, how far removed each is from a homeland, which groups rose to lead, which never left, and the neighborhoods they made. Historical and multi-generation figures are modeled estimates, not direct counts, and are labeled as such throughout.
Two centuries, eight waves
The shape of migration over time
From New Amsterdam to today, the city has shifted through distinct migration eras. Click a stop for the story and the groups that came with it.
The first European settlement sat on land long inhabited by the Lenape peoples. Its tiny population mixed Dutch and other northern Europeans with enslaved Africans (perhaps a fifth of the town) and a handful of others, including Portuguese Sephardic Jews who arrived in 1654.
Under British rule English and Dutch New Yorkers dominated, but the free and enslaved Black community predated and outlived it, and the city began to draw German and Irish migrants well before the famine. On the eve of mass immigration it was a largely settled, English-speaking town of a few hundred thousand.
Crop failures and famine drove the Irish across the Atlantic in numbers New York had never seen; German artisans and exiles came alongside. Within two decades the city shifted from a settled colonial town into a foreign-born metropolis.
A vast southern and eastern European migration peaked at Ellis Island: Italians built neighborhoods, Eastern European Jews crowded the Lower East Side. By 1910 the foreign-born and their children formed the large majority of residents.
Beginning in the First World War, Black families left the American South in the Great Migration, turning Harlem into a center of Black life. The African American share of the city's population grew through mid-century and peaked in the 1970s.
The 1920s quota acts all but closed European entry, and the foreign-born share of the population fell for decades. In the late 1940s to 1960s, U.S.-citizen Puerto Rican migration grew into one of the city's largest new communities.
The 1965 reform removed national-origin quotas. Migration from the Caribbean (led by Dominicans), Latin America and Asia rebuilt the migrant city, raising the foreign-born share after a half-century of decline.
No single group dominates. Chinese and South Asian migration strengthened, West African communities grew, and super-diverse enclaves like Jackson Heights and Flushing made New York routinely called the most ethnically varied big city in the world.
Where New Yorkers came from
A population by origin, 1820 - 2020
Each bar is a decade, cut into the estimated share of the population tracing mainly to each group. Hover a segment for the figure and its uncertainty.
How recent the roots are
A city that keeps starting over
Group residents by how close immigration sits in the family tree. First generation are foreign-born; second are born here to immigrant parents; third-and-older are settled New Yorkers. The blue band marks uncertainty around the foreign-born line.
Who led, era by era
The passing of the baton
Which group was largest, when it conceded dominance, and the first signs of the next wave. The bar is that group’s peak share of the foreign-born population. Click a row to expand. What "dominant" means changes over time - it is defined on each row.
Colonial New York was a majority foreign-born town by definition; nearly everyone was born abroad. Dominance here means simply that Dutch then British immigrants outnumbered every other group by a wide margin.
Famine flight made the Irish the city's first mass immigrant group - and, for a generation, its largest. Around a third of the 1850s foreign-born population was Irish.
German-speaking New Yorkers rivaled then surpassed the Irish as trade, craft and exile politics drew tens of thousands. Their numbers peaked near the turn of the century, then receded as southern and eastern Europe surged.
The great wave. Pogroms and poverty pushed Jews out of the Russian Pale while Italians built their own neighborhoods; together they doubled the city's population. Jewish newcomers formed the single largest cluster in the 1910 census.
Quota acts froze European entry. The foreign-born share of the city fell for four straight decades while a Great-Migration Black population and post-war Puerto Rican arrivals grew - both internal or citizen migrations outside the quota system.
The 1965 reforms reopened the door. A flight from the Caribbean, led by the Dominican community with Puerto Rican and West Indian flows, rebuilt the migrant city after its half-century lull.
Today New York is genuinely polyglot: Dominican, Chinese and Mexican migration each form similar shares, with South Asian and West African arrivals rising. No group holds the kind of plurality the Irish or Italians once did.
Still here
The ones who stayed
Most immigrant groups fade into a broad multi-generation American category within a couple of generations. A few have a continuous presence that reaches back to the city's founding. Wording here is deliberately careful: these are documented continuities, not uninterrupted majority power.
The original inhabitants of the land that became New York. Displaced but never absent, Lenape communities continue across the region and hold the deepest continuous presence of all.
Africans, first enslaved then increasingly free, have been in New York since New Amsterdam. The community predates the republic, was a founding part of the city through slavery's end, and swelled with the Great Migration into a defining force.
A small band of Portuguese Sephardic Jews arrived in 1654, founding a Jewish presence that is older than the American nation and continuous to this day - long predating the much larger Eastern European wave.
The largest immigrant group of the 1800s is still among the city's largest ancestry claims today, spread across every borough.
A continuous German-American presence from the colonial era, peaking in the late 1800s, still visible in neighborhoods and festival culture.
Italian neighborhoods from East Harlem to Bensonhurst anchored the southern European wave and persist as identity today.
From a handful of Manhattan establishments to several boroughs' Chinatowns - a 150-year, still-growing presence.
Puerto Rican arrivals before the Second World War opened a Latino stream that Dominicans, Mexicans and others carried far beyond it.
Pockets of the city
Neighborhoods as homelands
Migration shows up on a street map first. Use the filter to switch between present-day pockets and celebrated historical enclaves; click a row for a profile.
Lower Manhattan's Washington Street became the U.S. anchor of Syrian and Lebanese migration in the late 1800s. A thriving press, peddler trade and the first Arab-language periodicals made it the community's symbolic capital before urban renewal and the post-1965 diaspora largely dispersed it.
A largely Black-owned free community on the Upper West Side, one of the city's earliest settlements of African American property owners, with Irish and German neighbors. It was razed in 1857 to build Central Park, displacing its residents.
A West Side neighborhood of Black New Yorkers and early Caribbean and Spanish-speaking residents, later famed, alongside the African American Lincoln Theater district, as a center of early jazz and theater. Cleared from the late 1950s for slum clearance and the Lincoln Square redevelopment.
From a handful of residents in the 1870s to the largest and best-known Chinatown in the United States. It grew sharply after 1965, with Cantonese and later Fujianese arrivals, and still anchors the national Chinese American community.
The 'Athens of America,' a major center of Greek migration beginning in the 1960s, with Greek-run businesses, churches and cafés. Newer South Asian, Middle Eastern and other arrivals have widened it into a deeply mixed district.
Little Odessa. A large wave of Soviet Jewish emigration from the 1970s, accelerating in the 1990s, turned the boardwalk into a thriving Russian-speaking enclave with a recognizable commercial and cultural life.
One of New York's lasting Polish centers, with roots in the 19th century and a major postwar wave. It retains Polish institutions, churches, and shops even as newer arrivals diversify it.
The heart of Dominican New York, home to the city's largest Dominican community since the 60s, with a dense Dominican commercial and civic life along Broadway and St. Nicholas.
The second and fastest-growing Chinatown in the city, with a strong Korean presence and growing South Asian population, making it one of the most ethnically diverse commercial strips in the world.
Often called the most diverse neighborhood in the world: South Asian, Latino, Filipino, Tibetan and Caribbean residents alongside one another. Its single block on 37th Avenue is routinely cited as the most international stretch of street in the city.
A strong Indo-Caribbean (Guyanese and Trinidadian) center rooted in Caribbean migration since the 1970s, with West Indian food, businesses and religious life.
On the numbers
How to read what's above
All historical values above are estimates reconstructed from the census, Census Bureau historical working papers, the Princeton Mapping Historical New York atlas and historical scholarship - not direct counts. Official records of origin begin with the 1850 census, and ancestry attribution weakens with each generation, so treat every figure before 1900 - and every generational shade - as directional, not precise. Each chart carries a band approximating its confidence envelope, wider the further back it runs.
Race, ethnicity, ancestry and birthplace are not the same
The tools we use to count people change meaning. 'Birthplace' (used by pre-1960 censuses) measures where someone was born. 'Ancestry' is self-reported identity and allows several answers. 'Ethnicity' - Hispanic origin chiefly - is separate from race in the modern survey, and the census's race categories themselves changed repeatedly. Each chart uses a single, stated measure, but no single metric maps cleanly onto everyday labels.
A generation is a family distance, not a fixed number of years
We count the foreign-born as first generation, their New-York-born children as second, and everyone U.S.-born to U.S.-born parents as third and older. This is a simplification: migration happens at all ages, families intermarry, and ancestry fades in records. The boundary between second and later generations is the least reliable cut here.
City boundaries and categories have changed
This page uses the modern five-borough city throughout. New York did not consolidate into its current form until 1898, and earlier 'New York City' meant Manhattan alone. Figures for any year are rescaled loosely to the modern footprint, which adds uncertainty, especially before 1898.
What 'dominant' means shifts by era
Before 1965 we use the largest foreign-born population, counted by birthplace. After 1965 we use the largest reported immigrant or ancestry group. Neither is the same as 'most numerous New Yorkers' - the foreign-born have only ever been a (large) minority of the whole population.
Where it comes from
Sources and references
Rosenwaike, The Population History of New York City
U.S. Immigration Commission (Dillingham Commission)
IPUMS USA
Furman Center, NYU