New York and other American cities need immigrants

A couple of America’s leading anti-immigration voices made the shocking discovery in late June that a lot of New York City residents were born in other countries. Right-wing podcaster/provocateur Matt Walsh wrote on X.com that 40% of the city’s population is foreign-born, arguing that this meant “NYC isn’t an American city anymore by any reasonable definition of the term. It’s a tragedy and a disgrace.”

“NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration,” echoed the man apparently in charge of US immigration policy, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. He added a little later that, “To understand the pace and scope of migration to America in past years, one-third of NYC is foreign-born and almost two-thirds of NYC children live in a foreign-born household.”

The most recent estimate of New York City’s foreign-born population, from the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey, has it at 37.5% of the total. The 2024 number, to be released in September, will almost certainly be higher given the large numbers of asylum-seekers who arrived in the city in 2023 and 2024. So Walsh and Miller aren’t far off on the numbers. Their insinuation that this is something new is, however, ridiculous. New York City’s foreign-born share was higher in the 1800s and early 1900s than it is now, and has risen only slightly over the past quarter century.
Reliable pre-1850 numbers aren’t available, but the foreign-born percentage seems to have been somewhat lower than 1850’s 45.7% in 1840, and a lot lower for several decades before then because there wasn’t much immigration to the US from the American Revolution through about 1820. (New York City did receive big inflows in those days from elsewhere in the US, mainly the New England states.) Before independence, immigration from overseas waxed and waned, but for all of its post-European-settlement history, the city has been home to lots of people who came from someplace else. Without immigration, wave after wave after wave of it, New York would not be New York.

The city’s most troubled era in living memory, and possibly ever, came after immigrants fell to just 18.2% of the population in 1970. The subsequent decade was a time of high and rising crime, falling employment and fiscal crisis. You might even say it was a tragedy and a disgrace, although older New Yorkers do sometimes wax nostalgic about the cheap real estate. By almost every measure (economic indicators, health outcomes, crime rates), New Yorkers of all backgrounds are much better off now than they were in the 1970s.

The foreign-born population share for the entire US has never been as high as New York City’s at its low point. It peaked at 14.8% in 1890 and appears to be approaching that again now. Given that the US economy experienced perhaps its best decade ever in the 1960s in terms of economic growth and widely shared prosperity gains, it is possible to use national data to craft a narrative in which the low-immigration middle of the 20th century was a golden era and the times before and since less so.

Historical numbers from individual cities, which the Census Bureau compiled in handy format in 1999and I have updated with numbers from the 2000 Census and 2010 and 2023 American Community Surveys, mostly tell a different story, or stories. It’s not just in New York where high immigrant populations have gone hand in hand with good times and low immigrant populations with struggles. This is surely in part because immigrants are attracted to places with better economic prospects, but I’m guessing there’s more to it than that. In the US, where a bias against cities has been present since the nation’s founding, it has often been up to newcomers to make them succeed.

When immigrants don’t show up, the situation can get pretty dire. Cities in what came to be known as the Rust Belt had some of the highest foreign-born shares in the mid-1800s. In 1850, 63.7% of Milwaukee’s 20,061 residents in 1850 were foreign-born. Now, despite modest gains in recent decades, most are in the single digits.
These declines in the foreign-born population share were for a long time accompanied by rising prosperity. In 1950, Detroit was themost affluent city in the country and Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago were close. But after that, these cities began to hemorrhage population and wealth to the suburbs and the Sun Belt, with only Chicago experiencing significant immigration inflows after 1970. Cleveland now has only 40% as many residents as it did in 1950, Detroit 35%, St. Louis 33%.

San Francisco had similarly immigrant-driven 19th-century origins followed by a long decline in foreign-born population share, but that began to reverse as early as the 1950s. Other big California cities also experienced relatively early rebounds in immigration, with dizzying gains in the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles and San Jose. Economic experiences varied widely, though, with Los Angeles struggling since the 1980s while the San Francisco-San Jose area experienced a world-changing boom.
There’s also been an immigration rebound in the cities of the Acela Corridor along the East Coast, although it hasn’t been as strong in the other stops as in New York.
Finally, there’s the new immigration frontier of the South. In the wake of the Civil War, the region had few immigrants and decades of economic malaise ahead of it. It is now increasingly the nation’s economic powerhouse, and its booming cities have higher immigrant populations than ever.
The same isn’t true for less-successful Southern cities such as Birmingham, Memphis and New Orleans, which have experienced modest recent immigration gains but have yet to return to their late-1800s foreign-born population shares.

New Orleans was unique in the South as a magnet for immigrants in the 19th century. In the early 1800s, it was flooded with refugees from the bloody liberation struggle in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, the largest group of which came by way of Cuba. These newcomers transformed the city, helping build it into the financial, cultural and international-trade capital of the South. Miami, which wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1896, welcomed waves of refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America in the 20th century and now plays some of the economic role that New Orleans once did.
Miami is currently the large US city with by far the highest foreign-born population share, at 55.4%. But one can find even higher percentages in its suburbs, which together with suburbs of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Boston fill out out the rest of the list of communities with the highest foreign-born population shares in 2023. (The Census Bureau releases annual data for places with populations of 65,000 or higher.) Some, like first-place Hialeah, are working class. Others, like second-place Doral, are affluent.
The communities with the smallest foreign-born populations include few if any suburbs (Loveland, Colorado; Gary, Indiana; and Lorain, Ohio, are part of larger cities’ metropolitan areas but did not start out as bedroom communities). They are instead a mix of mostly shrinking and quite poor older cities in the Midwest and South and growing ones in the Dakotas and Mountain West, plus the booming retirement community of The Villages in Florida.

Some of these low-immigration cities are very nice places, but none has a median household income above the national median of $77,719, and that’s almost certainly not a coincidence. Immigrants to the US tend to congregate in and around the country’s most productive, most expensive cities, economists Christoph Albert and Joan Monras concluded in a study published in the American Economic Review in 2022, because many are more interested in maximizing the amount they earn to send to relatives or spend upon their return to their home countries than in their living standards here in the US. This, in turn, has helped counteract the “spatial misallocation of labor” caused by too-scarce housing in such places, Albert and Monras also found, making the US economy a bit more productive and all of us, on average, better off.

This is another element of the role immigrants play in US cities that Walsh and Miller surely did not consider when they decided to bash New York City’s foreign-born residents. Instead, they appear to have mainly been grasping for talking points in the wake of Uganda-born democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory (since confirmed) in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary. But even there the implied argument — that more immigrants equates to more-leftist politics — doesn’t really hold up. Miami and its environs are currently quite Republican, and President Donald Trump probably won the national immigrant vote in 2024. Immigrants do lots of different things. Destroying American cities just isn’t one of them.