I find the information on illegal immigrant enforcement interesting, however, am puzzled why 76% of commuters are still driving into the city. That has got to stop. there is no reason to drive into Manhattan at this point, unless you use your car to work (taxi drivers, etc.).
‘White Flight’ Has Reversed, Census Finds
The share of non-Hispanic whites in the city had been shrinking since at least 1940. As the overall population grew, their ranks declined by 361,000 in the 1990s alone. Since 2000, though, their number has increased by more than 100,000. Half of that increase was recorded from 2006 to 2007.
“The fact that it is not going down is the news,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division at the Department of City Planning. “The increase is small, but the relative stability of the number and percent is meaningful.”
He described the turnaround as a testament to the city’s “diversity and ethnic heterogeneity” and said it “sets New York apart from many other older cities where this is not the case.”
Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, called the apparent trend a potential “harbinger of racial equilibrium.”
But he cautioned that it could be short-lived given the turmoil on Wall Street, because “a lot of the non-Hispanic whites are plainly associated with the financial community.”
Meanwhile, the influx of Hispanic people, who have fueled New York City’s recent population explosion, has leveled off since 2006 as the pace of immigration has generally slowed nationwide. According to the Census Bureau’s estimates, the share of Hispanic people in the city in 2007 dipped, if barely, for the first time in decades — a decline that was more pronounced in Manhattan and Brooklyn than in nearly any other county in the country.Hispanic people account for 27 percent of the population. Asians, who account for nearly 12 percent of New Yorkers, had been the fastest-growing group in the city, but were outpaced last year by non-Hispanic whites, who inched up past 35 percent of the population. The proportion of blacks dipped to 23.5 percent.
While the foreign-born population nationally advanced to 12.6 percent (the highest percentage since 1920), a record high of more than 38 million, from 2006 to 2007, the number of immigrants declined in 14 states, including New Jersey and Connecticut.
Nationally, the number rose by about 512,000 in 2007 compared with an annual average increase of nearly a million since the beginning of the decade. New Jersey and Illinois fell from the list of states with the biggest gain in immigrants, displaced by Arizona and Pennsylvania.
“New York City may be drawing in fewer fresh-off-the-boat — or, more accurately, fresh-off-the-airplane — Hispanic arrivals,” said Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College. “At the same time, there’s been movement out of New York City among longer-term Latino immigrant residents to suburbs, exurbs and even further afield in search of cheaper housing and better schools and in response to job opportunities elsewhere in the country.
“Even when economic times are rough in New York, they are even more difficult in the Caribbean and Latin America, so people there still want to come to the U.S.,” she said. “And many continue to head for New York, where they have friends and family. And jobs, although perhaps less plentiful and harder to get, are still available.”
The Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey of social, economic and housing statistics also found that about half the residents of metropolitan Los Angeles and Miami over age 5 (and about one in five Americans in that age group nationally) do not speak English at home and that about 31 percent of immigrants were born in Mexico.
Median home values rose in price by 2 percent from 2006 to 2007, the lowest increase in several years, the survey said. Homeowners with mortgages in California and New Jersey recorded the highest median monthly housing costs ($2,314 and $2,278, respectively).The share of owners and renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs generally dipped in New York City and rose in the suburbs.
Even with gas prices more than doubling from 2000 to 2007, the proportion of commuters driving to work alone in 2007 — 76 percent — remained the same as when the decade began.
As for the decline in the pace of immigration, demographers attributed the decrease to several factors, including stricter enforcement against illegal immigrants and the beginnings of a recession that dissuaded some people from coming to America and drove others to return home. An analysis by William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, found that of those 14 states, seven recorded losses among Hispanic immigrants and 10 among Asians. In several, including Connecticut and Illinois, the number of foreign-born whites declined.
Dr. Frey found that the influx of Hispanic immigrants declined last year to about 350,000 from more than 500,000 annually during the rest of the decade so far.
“Over all,” he said, “these trends reflect a reaction to employment downturns in previously fast-growing states that provided jobs in construction, retail and meatpacking, like Colorado and New Mexico, as well as poorer job prospects in traditional magnet states like New Jersey, Florida and Illinois.”
“More so than in the past,” he said, “it seems that the geography of immigrants has been determined by the economy.”
Jeffrey S. Passell, senior demographer of the Pew Hispanic Center, said the slowdown appeared to mirror a similar decline earlier in the decade and may have accelerated since the 2007 American Community Survey.
“What we saw in 2002 was a drop, especially in Mexican immigration and especially illegal — 30 percent or so, and we attributed it mainly to the economy,” he said.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment