1  Introduction, Overview, and Data Sources

The Newest New Yorkers: A Statistical Portrait of Foreign-born Residents and Their Role in Shaping the City’s Population (2026 edition) provides a comprehensive portrait of immigrants in New York City. It examines the countries of origin of the city’s foreign-born, their patterns of residence, their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, the legal paths of entry of newly admitted immigrants, the role of the foreign-born in the New York region, and finally assesses the demographic impact of immigrants on the city. This is the latest volume in The Newest New Yorkers series, which began in 1992 with the publication of The Newest New Yorkers: An Analysis of Immigration to New York City in the 1980s, and continued with The Newest New Yorkers, 1990-1994, and The Newest New Yorkers, 1995-1996, each focusing on newly arrived immigrants. The series has since had an expanded focus on all foreign-born New Yorkers, starting with the revamped The Newest New Yorkers, 2000 and then The Newest New Yorkers, 2013. This 2026 edition of The Newest New Yorkers builds on the preceding volumes and provides detailed analyses of updated data. It continues a tradition of providing comprehensive information on the foreign-born to policymakers, program planners, and service providers, to help them better understand the needs of a diverse population that continues to reshape the city. And for the first time, this edition includes interactive content.

New York City’s demography is dynamic, defined by the ebb and flow of people. As some people leave the city for places in the region and beyond, the city’s population continues to be replenished by the flow of new immigrants. These demographic changes result in a unique level of diversity—nearly one-third of the city’s 3.1 million foreign-born residents arrived in the United States in 2010 or later; 48 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home; and in just four decades, what was a city with a population of primarily European origins has now become a place with no dominant racial/Hispanic or national-origin group. Indeed, New York’s unmatched diversity epitomizes the concept of the world city.

Most U.S. cities in the Northeast and Midwest reached their population peak in 1950, after which many experienced large declines associated with suburbanization and economic changes that led to central city job losses. While New York also initially experienced declines as a result of these forces, the city’s population was replenished by the flow of new immigrants. After a loss of 10 percent of its population in the 1970s, the city rebounded on the heels of a historic economic transformation from manufacturing to service industries that, in turn, acted as a magnet for further immigration. Large flows, along with high immigrant fertility, brought the city into an era of renewal and growth, which propelled the population to a new peak of 8.8 million in 2020.

In addition to stabilizing New York City’s population, immigration has had a huge impact on the city’s racial/Hispanic composition. With the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the abolition of quotas, the countries from which immigrants originated shifted, from predominantly southern and eastern Europe to flows primarily from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and later Africa. New York City’s foreign-born population reflects immigrant streams from every corner of the world, unmatched by any other city. In 2023, overall, immigrants were concentrated in the working ages, were disproportionately female, and a plurality lived in married-couple households. Such generalizations are of limited use, however, because of the distinct characteristics of specific immigrant groups, which are highlighted in this report. The relative youthfulness of Mexican immigrants contrasted with the older age profile of Italian immigrants. The heavily female immigrant Russian and Filipino populations differed strikingly from the disproportionately male immigrant populations from Mexico and the United Kingdom. Similarly, while immigrants were more likely to be living in married-couple households compared to other city residents, substantial differences were apparent by country of origin. The immigrant population is not a monolith, and this report highlights differences by country of origin, which tend to be salient for program planners trying to reach immigrant groups with specific sociodemographic characteristics.

1.1 Structure of the Report

The Newest New Yorkers, 2026 has seven chapters. Following this Introduction, Chapter 2, Change and Composition of the Immigrant Population, presents information on the size and country of origin composition of the foreign-born population, with a special emphasis on change over the last half century. Once a city largely populated by European immigrants and their descendants, New York now boasts a remarkably diverse mix of immigrants.

Chapter 3, Patterns of Residence of the Foreign-born examines the spatial distribution of New York’s foreign-born population, highlighting the top immigrant neighborhoods in the city. It documents the waxing and waning of foreign-born enclaves in neighborhoods across the city during the past decade. The chapter also examines leading immigrant groups in each borough and in major neighborhoods across the city. Since a large portion of immigration is tied to kinship networks, a neighborhood that is home to many immigrants tends to attract more recent entrants as well, resulting in ethnic enclaves. The top neighborhoods of residence are tabulated and mapped for the major foreign-born groups.

Chapter 4, Sociodemographic Profile of the Foreign-born, provides a comprehensive look at measures of demographic (age, sex, and family type), housing (tenure and overcrowding), social (educational attainment, year of entry, and English proficiency), economic (median household income, poverty status, and public assistance), and labor force (labor force participation, occupation, and class of worker) characteristics for New York City’s top 20 foreign-born groups. These profiles provide perspective on the distinct needs of different groups and are crucial in formulating policies and programs that better fit these communities.

Chapter 5, The Paths to Permanent Resident Status, examines data on newly admitted immigrants, which was made available by the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. These data provide a unique look at the legal pathways of admission of newly admitted immigrants (here defined as those obtaining green cards) who listed an address in New York City as their intended place of residence. While immigrant admissions continue to be closely related to family linkages with U.S. residents, changes put in place with the 1990 Immigration Act have changed the pathways immigrants use to gain admission; new countries have appeared as a result of the diversity visa pool (for nations underrepresented in U.S. immigration flows), and several nations have increased their numbers by navigating new pathways opened up for skilled workers. This chapter provides detailed analyses of classes of admission for the top 20 sending countries over the past four decades, as well as tables showing the top counties of origin for each class of admission in the most recent period.

Chapter 6, Immigrant New York in a Regional Context, offers an analysis of immigrants in the 31 county New York metropolitan region, a recognition that immigration is increasingly a regional phenomenon. Indeed, 53 percent of immigrants in the region live in the 26 counties outside New York City. In earlier decades, counties adjacent to the city were secondary destinations of settlement, as many post-1965 immigrants migrated out of the city and made their home in the suburbs. These counties are now primary destinations of settlement as many newly arrived immigrants bypass the city and settle directly in other parts of the region. The analysis divides these 26 counties into the inner ring of 12 counties that are nearest the city and the outer ring of 14 counties that are farther away.

Chapter 7, The Impact of Immigration on New York City’s Past, Present, and Future, examines the effects of immigration on the city’s population size and composition, labor force, and housing. With well over one-third of New York City’s population foreign-born, this chapter explores the outsized role immigration and immigrants play in the city’s population processes, as well as its sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

1.2 Data Sources and Concepts

The main objective of this report is to describe residents of New York City who are foreign-born. The primary source of information is the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), which provides data on the characteristics of all foreign-born residents based on a sample of the population. In the ACS, the foreign-born population includes anyone who lived for at least two months in their current location at the time of interview; this includes those who resided in the city on a temporary basis, such as students and workers on temporary assignments. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 in particular focus on the immigrant stock using ACS data.

Data collection in the ACS occurs on a continuous basis; each month some 295,000 housing units in the nation are selected to participate. Each year, sample cases for the 12 months of the preceding calendar year are combined to create the 1-year data files, including for New York City and its five boroughs. Data for the preceding five calendar years are also combined to produce 5-year files. Most of the analyses in this volume utilize 1-year data for 2023, though some data also come from the 2019-2023 5-year files as well.

The 1-year ACS data are based on a roughly 1 percent sample of New York City’s population, and they provide generally reliable estimates for the city as a whole and its five boroughs. While they do provide sub-borough estimates, they do not supply data for small and mid-sized geographic areas like neighborhoods (or for many small towns and cities in the metropolitan region). Creating neighborhood tabulations requires data samples spanning multiple years, and given the small geographic size, neighborhoods require a sufficiently large population to yield reliable estimates. This report uses a modified version of Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) to provide reliable estimates, approximating the neighborhoods with which New Yorkers are familiar. NTAs are aggregates of the city’s 2,327 census tracts and are subsets of New York City’s 59 Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTAs). Primarily due to these constraints, NTA boundaries and their associated names may not definitively represent neighborhoods. In this report, some of the NTAs representing larger neighborhoods have been combined to make the combinations more relatable. For example, “Bushwick (West)” and “Bushwick (East)” have been combined to form a single NTA called “Bushwick.” This report utilizes 164 NTAs, slightly fewer than the 197 original NTAs because of these new combinations. These NTAs are referred to as neighborhoods and are meant to provide broad reference points to analyze patterns of immigrant settlement.

Neighborhood tabulations are based on a 5-year ACS sample for the period 2019-2023, which essentially represent an average for a characteristic—for example, the number of residents born in a specific country—over that period. While the broad time interval for this reference period is less than ideal, this disadvantage is more than offset by the larger 5-year sample of about 5 percent, which improves the reliability of neighborhood estimates. These 5-year neighborhood estimates are presented alongside comparable 5-year estimates for their respective boroughs. However, the 5-year estimates averaged over 2019-2023 for the boroughs will differ from the 1-year, timelier, 2023 estimates used in other sections. Sometimes these differences may be sizable; nevertheless, each analysis still offers useful descriptions of characteristics and patterns of residence that can be melded into an overall portrait of immigrant New York.

When possible, this report makes use of the Summary File tables from the ACS, which are tabulated results for specific categories and groups provided by the Census Bureau. When it comes to detailed demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of foreign-born groups, custom cross-tabulations were required. These were primarily constructed from the ACS Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) file for 2023, but also from the 2019-2023 5-year data file when a larger sample size was required. The PUMS files contain records that have the attributes of residents, including their nativity and birthplace, with steps taken to preserve the confidentiality of individual respondents. The 2023 PUMS file contains under a 1 percent sample of the city’s population, including records for approximately 26,000 foreign-born respondents, while the 2019-2023 5-year PUMS file has a nearly 4 percent sample or about 125,000 foreign-born respondents. Estimates derived from PUMS differ slightly from those derived from the Summary File tables, where both sources are available; this is in part due to PUMS data comprising a subsample of the full set of ACS responses used to produce the Summary File tables, as well as due to disclosure avoidance techniques. Differences in reference years and sample weighting also lead to differences in corresponding estimates of the 1-year and 5-year ACS data.

It is important to note that ACS data are subject to sampling error, which refers to variability in estimates due to the use of a sample. In general, when comparisons are made, highlighted differences have all been deemed to be statistically significant. Data that are statistically unreliable are presented in gray in the tables.

As a final note on the 2023 ACS, these data underestimate the total and foreign-born populations of the city. The ACS is controlled to population estimates produced by the Census Bureau. The 2023 Vintage estimates did not fully reflect the population of migrants in New York City, in part because of an underestimate of migration at the national level. To correct for this, a methodological update was integrated into the 2024 estimates which improved estimates of international migration. In addition, the Census Bureau had access to more complete information on the population in temporary shelters in New York, incorporating data provided by the city on changes in the population, including asylum seekers, in these facilities. The result of these improvements was an upward revision of 133,000 to the estimate of New York City’s population as of July 2023, largely reflecting the influx of migrants; however, these updates are not reflected in the 2023 ACS. Updated figures for the total and foreign-born populations are reflected in the 2024 ACS data.

Unlike the analyses of the total foreign-born population in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6, Chapter 5 focuses on the flow of newly admitted immigrants to New York City, as well as their country of birth and paths to admission. This analysis is based on data from the administrative records of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics at the Department of Homeland Security. These data include the annual immigrant tape files for federal fiscal years 1982 to 2001 and published tabulations from 2002 to 2021. These data show how newly admitted immigrants navigate immigration law, detailing the legal paths of entry they employ. Administrative data on newly admitted immigrants are the only source of such information and allow us to understand the effect of U.S. immigration law on the size and character of legal immigration to the city. All respondents who listed their intended residence as within the five boroughs of New York City were included in this analysis.

The final chapter uses a number of data sources to highlight the impact of immigration on New York City. To explain the dynamic nature of the city’s population, decennial census counts from 1900 to 2020 and Vintage 2024 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau are used. Data on births and deaths dating back to 1900 from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene were compiled and reported by Ira Rosenwaike’s 1972 book-length study Population History of New York City and by the New York City Department of City Planning. Additional data on births and deaths are sourced from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Estimates from the Pew Research Center and the Migration Policy Institute are used to explore the unauthorized immigrant population. Multiple ACS files, as well as decennial censuses, provide data on sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics of migrants. The 2023 Current Population Survey supplies data on immigrant generation. In addition, the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey is employed to analyze the role immigrants play in the city’s housing market.