Lewis Mumford Center Census 2000 American Newcomers Report

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Hispanic immigrants from Los Angeles to nearby areas, including Orange County, Riverside-San Bernardino, and San Diego. These areas are also among the ten in the nation with the highest number of foreign-born. Counting Los Angeles, these four Southern California metros are the home of fully 19% of America’s foreign-born residents.

Table 3. Metropolitan regions with the largest numbers of immigrants in 2000
		Immigrants		Share of population
		2000	1990	2000	1990
1	Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA	3,449,444	2,892,456	36.2%	32.7%
2	New York, NY	3,139,647	2,285,024	33.7%	26.8%
3	Chicago, IL	1,425,978	885,081	17.2%	11.9%
4	Miami, FL	1,147,765	874,569	50.9%	45.1%
5	Houston, TX	854,669	440,321	20.5%	13.3%
6	Orange County, CA	849,899	575,108	29.9%	23.9%
7	Washington, DC	832,016	489,641	16.9%	11.6%
8	Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	612,359	360,643	18.8%	13.9%
9	San Diego, CA	606,254	428,810	21.5%	17.2%
10	Dallas, TX	591,169	234,522	16.8%	8.8%
11	Oakland, CA	573,144	337,435	24.0%	16.2%
12	San Jose, CA	573,130	347,201	34.1%	23.2%
13	San Francisco, CA	554,819	441,290	32.0%	27.5%

New York is the other great immigrant metropolis. It has nearly as many immigrants as Los Angeles (3.1 million), this population is growing faster (up about 40% in the last decade), and it has more diverse origins. While New York is second to Los Angeles in the number of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, it nearly makes up the difference as the nation’s major destination for white immigrants from Europe and the Middle East (nearly 750,000) and black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa (over 500,000). It draws far fewer Mexicans than is common in the Southwest. Instead it has a distinctive mix of Dominicans, Central Americans, and South Americans, groups who generally live in or near New York’s large Puerto Rican neighborhoods. And it has over 700,000 Asians, including especially large numbers of people from China and India. Together with Newark and the surrounding suburbs in New York and Northern New Jersey, Greater New York accounts for 16% of America’s immigrants.

Chicago is the only major destination for immigrants in the Midwest. Only about one in six Chicagoans is foreign-born, compared to more than a third of residents of the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan regions. But its nearly 1.5 million immigrant residents place it third in the nation, up from about 900,000 in 1990. Chicago has an old reputation for immigration from Eastern Europe, and indeed over 400,000 of its foreign-born residents are non-Hispanic whites. But the largest number, close to 700,000, are Hispanic, and of these most are Mexican. Another 300,000 are Asian. Miami, famous for its Cuban minority, has over 1.1 million immigrants. The vast majority, over 900,000, are Latinos, with growing numbers of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans to augment the Cuban population. Nearly 100,000 of these immigrants are black, about equally from Haiti and the English-speaking Afro-Caribbean nations. These combine with Fort Lauderdale’s black immigrants to create a strong Afro-Caribbean presence in South Florida.

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