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Recently the Department of Planning of New York issued a report which laid bare a full scale of change of the city. In 1970, 18 percent of the city's population was foreign-born. By 1995, the figure had risen to 33 percent, and another 20 percent were the US-born off springs of immigrants3. So immigrants and their children now form a majority of the city's population. Who are these New Yorkers? Why do they come here? Where are they from? (OK, time to drop the "they". I'm one of them.) The last question at least is easy to answer: we come from everywhere. In the list of the top 20 source nations of those sending immigrants to New York between 1990 and 1994 are six countries in Asia, five in the Caribbean, four in Latin America, three in Europe, plus Israel and the former Soviet Union. And when we immigrants get here we roll up our sleeves. "If you're not ready to work when you get to New York," says a friend of mine, "you'd better hit the road." The mayor of New York once said, "Immigration continues to shape the unique character and drive the economic engine of New York City. "He believes that immigrants are at the heart of what makes New York great. In Europe, by contrast, it is much more common to hear politicians worry about the loss of "unity" that immigration brings to their societies. In the quarter century since 1970, the United States admitted about 12.5 million legal immigrants, and has absorbed them into its social structures with an ease beyond the imagination of other nations. Since these immigrants are purposeful and hard-working, they will help America to make a fresh start in the next century. |