To understand the threat of current enforcement efforts, appreciate what newcomers, documented and undocumented, contribute to the city.
Immigration is essential to New York City’s vitality. The numbers alone are extraordinary. After nearly half a century of huge inflows from abroad, more than 1 out of 3 New Yorkers are now immigrants, or around 3.1 million people in a city of almost 8.5 million, according to 2024 census data. Together with their U.S.-born children, they are an estimated half of the city’s population, the overwhelming majority with origins in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The city now has a foreign-born mayor — born in Uganda to parents of South Asian origin — who made history as the first Muslim to hold the position. It is not surprising, given Zohran Mamdani’s background and bases of electoral support, that he declared in his election-night speech that New York is built and powered by immigrants. At the same time, the very fact that immigration has been so critical in New York City raises questions about the degree to which the Trump administration’s plans for the massive deportation of undocumented immigrants and slashing of legal immigration will spell trouble for the city and its economy in the next few years.
A major reason immigration is so important to New York is that it is a significant motor of the city’s economy. As researchers David Kallick and Anthony Capote report based on an analysis of the American Community Survey’s 2022 five-year sample: Immigrants, both those with legal status and those without, are literally building the city. An astounding 63% of the workers in the city’s construction industry are foreign-born, an estimated 41% of them undocumented. At the low end of the job hierarchy, nearly three-quarters of all construction laborers are immigrants; higher up, thousands of foreign-born people are painters, plumbers and paperhangers, and, still higher in status, many immigrants hold professional positions connected to the city’s construction industry — making up 36% of architects, for example, and 62% of electrical engineers.
Immigrants are also central to the restaurant industry, another mainstay of New York’s economy: They are roughly two-thirds or more of the city’s food preparation workers, head cooks and chefs, and servers. In food as well as other sectors, immigrants have established a great many small businesses, so that by 2022 they accounted for 48% of all self-employed, incorporated business owners in the city. Immigrants have invented new types of businesses, too, including nail salons pioneered by Korean immigrants that are now ubiquitous in New York City and the wider metropolitan area.
The health care industry is heavily dependent on immigrants, from those changing beds in hospitals and nursing homes to the physicians who diagnose and treat patients. A whopping four-fifths of the city’s home health aides are foreign-born, 53% of all registered nurses and 45% of all physicians. Without immigrant health care workers, the city would be plunged into crisis. The need for immigrant workers in health care — as in other parts of the economy — will become even more pressing in the future amid demographic changes. As the baby boomers age and retire, more people will be required to fill jobs they are vacating at all levels of the occupational hierarchy and, in an aging city, to meet growing needs in health care and other services. That immigrants provide many other services, from in-home childcare and housecleaning to home repairs, has made such services more affordable and thus more widely available. In this way, immigrants’ lower-paid labor has subsidized the lifestyle of middle- and upper-middle-class New Yorkers.
What about fears that competition from immigrants will hurt native-born workers? These are greatly exaggerated. As I detail in my book, “One Quarter of the Nation,” the consensus among economists is that immigration’s adverse effects on U.S.-born workers’ wages and employment have, overall, been very small: Immigrants not only provide, but also increase demand for, goods and services; immigrant-owned small firms and startups often generate job opportunities for native-born workers; and highly educated immigrants boost productivity. Because immigrants and their families themselves use services, they have boosted the economy and job growth, including swelling demand for workers in an array of public service jobs, from teachers and bus drivers to workers in public administration. Public schools in the five boroughs are often overcrowded, but without large-scale immigration and a substantial second generation, many would have downsized or closed; the demand for teachers would have been reduced, along with the need for lower-level employees, from custodians to kitchen staff.
Immigration has been a boon to the city in another way: revitalizing a number of neighborhoods that had fallen on hard times in the post-World War II years, when their populations declined as large numbers moved to the suburbs and the Sun Belt. Without immigration, it is likely that many apartments and houses in the neighborhoods left behind would have been vulnerable to abandonment. Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and Sunset Park are two examples where immigrants brought new vitality, lifting the population, spurring economic growth and helping reestablish a commercial base as the newcomers started small businesses such as grocery shops and convenience stores.
Immigration has also made New York City safer. A common belief is that rising immigration leads to rising crime rates, but this is a myth. Immigration was a factor behind the decline in violent crime in urban America from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. In 2014, New York City had fewer than 330 murders, at the time the lowest number since comparable records were kept — and despite a population larger than in 1990. In 2025, the figure was down to 309 homicides, making New York one of the safest cities in America.
What explains why immigrants have helped reduce violent crime? One factor is that they are a favorably self-selected population: ambitious, motivated to work and concerned with avoiding deportation. Something else is going on at the neighborhood level, where research indicates that large numbers of immigrants seem to lower crime and violence. The concentration of immigration in particular neighborhoods — leading to population growth and a reduction in housing vacancies — means more “eyes on the street” for informal neighborhood monitoring.
Nor should we forget how immigration has enriched New York City’s culture: the foods New Yorkers eat, the music they listen and dance to, the novels they read, the films and television programs they watch. If Italians a century ago brought us pizza and Russian Jews introduced the bagel, post-1965 Chinese immigration has brought a wide range of new cuisines, including Sichuan, Hunan and Shanghai. You can now find a good Mexican taco in New York, as well as an Argentine empanada and Colombian arepa. Latin and Asian American parades have joined old staples like the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The West Indian American Day Parade Carnival is now the city’s largest ethnic festival, attracting hundreds of thousands who come to Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway to celebrate it every Labor Day. Many plays on and off Broadway have immigrant themes and stars. While the cultural contributions of immigrants and the second generation typically draw on home-country customs, they also blend aspects of immigrant and American cultures, in this way becoming Americanized mixtures in the New York context.
Finally, immigration has created a new and growing born-in-New-York second generation who, as a large-scale study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz and his colleagues shows, generally are doing better economically than their foreign-born parents. They have the ability to combine American and immigrant cultural patterns in ways that support getting ahead, as well as the good fortune to have parents who have instilled in them a high level of motivation. There is every reason to expect that second-generation New Yorkers will continue to add vitality and dynamism as they, once again, help to make New York City great.
Less happily, there is the specter of falling immigration levels in the next several years owing to the Trump administration’s policies to deport undocumented immigrants on a massive scale and cut back on the number of new legal arrivals. These policies have the potential to dampen economic growth in the city and create shortages of workers in such key sectors of the economy as health care and construction, especially given the ongoing outflow of residents to the suburbs and elsewhere in the country. Still, to end on a more optimistic note, Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant policies are unlikely to last forever. Indeed, demographic pressures — falling fertility rates nationwide and a need to fill many jobs previously held by the large number of retiring baby boomers — may well lead future presidents to support relatively high levels of legal immigration from abroad.
To the extent that the United States continues to admit a sizable number of new immigrants, New York City is bound to receive a not-insignificant share, if only because of the networks that link newcomers to established settlers as well as the demand for workers to shore up the city’s labor force and provide services for a large aging population. In that context, new immigrant arrivals — along with established immigrant residents and their adult children — can be counted on to enrich the city’s economy, communities and culture as they have done for the last half-century. The days of New York as a vibrant immigrant center are far from over.
