Immigration Has Growing Impact On New York's Suburbs

The startling trends are reported in the American Community Survey, a new annual version of the federal Census Bureau's long-form questionnaire designed to capture the nation's demographic profile.

To be sure, foreign-born populations continue to increase in NYC, and the proportion of immigrants has reached nearly 37 percent, inching toward the record 40 percent registered early in the 20th century. Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division of New York's Department of City Planning estimated that the number of foreign-born and their children "is easily in excess of 60 percent, maybe even two-thirds."

But whites are returning to Manhattan and Brooklyn, while the number of blacks in the city, primarily native-born, declined, probably for the first time since the Civil War.

The latest figures indicate, though, that many of those new arrivals may have chosen to go to the suburbs outside the city, suggesting that the melting pot was, in effect, overflowing. The total number of foreign born residents in the city, in fact, increased by only 60,000 over five years, or 2 percent.

"You have enhanced mobility among the foreign-born where they're picking up and going to other places quicker", Salvo indicated.

On the other hand, he said: "We may be reaching a point where the city's population gets to be so large you can’t keep adding. The pressure on housing and our neighborhoods is still on."

In New Jersey, the number of immigrants grew to 19.5 percent, the third-highest proportion of any state after California and New York.

Among children younger than 15, white residents who are not Hispanic have become a minority in the metropolitan area, an indication that within just a few years the New York region will become the first large metropolitan area outside the South or West where non-Hispanic whites are a minority.

This summer and fall, the Census Bureau will release results on income, poverty and housing from the 2005 survey.