Roughly 37 per cent of New Yorkers today were born in another country. That is a higher share than at any point since 1910, and the fact that those two dates bracket the story is the point: New York has been an immigrant city twice, with a fifty-year gap in the middle when the law made it something else.
Before the great wave
The Dutch settlement was polyglot from the start — a Jesuit visitor in 1643 counted eighteen languages spoken in a town of a few hundred. That was commerce rather than principle; the Dutch West India Company wanted trade and trade needed people.
The first mass arrival came in the 1840s. The Irish famine brought over a million people to the United States, and New York was where most of them landed and a great many stayed. By 1855 roughly a quarter of the city’s population was Irish-born. They arrived destitute, into the worst housing in the city, and met open hostility — the “No Irish Need Apply” signs were real, and so was the anti-Catholic politics that produced them.
Germans came in the same period, fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848 and rural poverty, and settled in the East Village in such numbers that it was called Kleindeutschland — the largest German-speaking settlement outside Europe.
Both groups arrived through Castle Garden, the converted fort at The Battery, which processed about eight million people between 1855 and 1890 and which you can still walk into for free.
Ellis Island, 1892–1954
Ellis Island opened in 1892 as a federal facility, replacing state control. About twelve million people passed through it. The peak year was 1907, with over a million, and one day in April of that year saw 11,747.
The arrivals were different from the earlier waves — Italians, Poles, Russians, Greeks, Hungarians, Slovaks, and around two million Eastern European Jews escaping pogroms and legal persecution in the Russian Empire.
Most got through in three to five hours. The examination was quick: doctors watched people climb the stairs, looking for a limp or laboured breathing, and chalked a letter on the coat of anyone to be looked at further. Around two per cent were refused entry, usually for contagious disease or on the grounds that they were likely to become a public charge.
The story that names were changed at Ellis Island is not true. Inspectors worked from the ship’s manifest, compiled at the port of departure, and had no authority to alter it.
Where they went: the Lower East Side, which by 1900 held around half a million people in two square miles, making it the most densely populated place on earth. The Tenement Museum on Orchard Street preserves the actual rooms.
The door closes
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 ended it. The quotas were set as a percentage of each nationality’s share of the US population in 1890 — a date chosen deliberately, before the southern and eastern European wave — and the effect was to cut Italian immigration by about 90 per cent and Eastern European Jewish immigration almost entirely. Asian immigration was barred outright, extending the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Ellis Island’s role shifted to detention and deportation and it closed in 1954.
The half-century that followed is the one people picture as classic New York: white ethnic neighbourhoods, second-generation Americans, the city of the 1940s and 50s films. It was a product of closed borders.
The other great migration of that period was internal. The Great Migration brought roughly six million Black Americans out of the rural South between 1916 and 1970, and Harlem became the largest Black community in the country and the centre of American Black culture.
Puerto Ricans, who are US citizens, arrived in very large numbers in the 1940s and 50s, settling in East Harlem, the South Bronx and the Lower East Side.
1965, and the second city
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas and replaced them with family reunification and skills-based preferences. Its sponsors expected it to change the numbers very little. It transformed the country.
New York’s new arrivals came from places that had barely featured before: the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Guyana, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Korea, the Philippines, Haiti, Trinidad, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Ghana, Nigeria, Yemen, Bangladesh, Tibet.
They did not mostly settle in Manhattan. They settled in Queens, which is now the most linguistically diverse place on earth by most measures, and in Brooklyn and the Bronx. That is why the food and the texture of the outer boroughs is so much richer than Manhattan’s, and why any honest account of contemporary New York has to leave the island.
Where to see it
Ellis Island — the Registry Room and the immigration museum, and the searchable passenger records.
Castle Clinton — the earlier depot, free, at the Battery.
Tenement Museum — the preserved apartments at 97 and 103 Orchard Street, including the tours covering post-1965 families.
Eldridge Street Synagogue — the 1887 Moorish Revival synagogue that now stands in Chinatown, which is the whole story in one building.
The Schomburg Center in Harlem, for the Great Migration.
Jackson Heights, Flushing, Sunset Park and Arthur Avenue — the living version, and the most useful afternoon you can spend on this subject.