Christie Agrees to In-State Tuition for Undocumented Immigrants

New York Times

By Kirk Semple

December 19, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/nyregion/christie-agrees-to-in-state-tuition-for-undocumented-immigrants.html?hpw&rref=nyregion

The New Jersey Legislature approved legislation on Thursday that would allow students without legal immigration status to pay in-state college tuition. Gov. Chris Christie planned to sign it on Friday, a spokesman said.

The bill’s passage was assured after Mr. Christie, a Republican, struck a deal with Democratic lawmakers, who agreed to a demand of his that they change the bill to remove a provision allowing undocumented immigrants access to state financial aid programs.

“This is what compromise looks like,” the governor said at a news conference in Trenton after the accord was revealed.

The legislation, commonly known as the Dream Act, had become a political wedge between the state’s large immigrant population and Mr. Christie, who has long tried to balance the sometimes-conflicting demands of being the chief executive of a liberal-leaning state while also gathering support for a possible Republican presidential candidacy.

After the deal was struck, the State Assembly passed a bill that would have allowed certain immigrants without legal status to qualify for in-state tuition as well as financial aid. The Senate approved an identical bill last month.

But in keeping with the terms of the compromise, Mr. Christie blocked the measure with a conditional veto that included a demand for the removal of the financial aid provision. Under a conditional veto, a bill is rejected unless the Legislature agrees to the changes or overrides the veto with a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

This legislative choreography was the culmination of years of lobbying by immigrants and their advocates for so-called tuition equality in New Jersey.

With Mr. Christie’s signature, New Jersey will join at least 17 other states where in-state tuition is available to some immigrant students without legal status, according to the National Immigration Law Center. Three states — California, New Mexico and Texas — allow those immigrants access to state financial aid.

During Mr. Christie’s re-election campaign this year, he spoke favorably of tuition equality. But after winning by a landslide, helped by the support of about half of Hispanic voters, he made comments on the issue that drew the criticism of the bill’s supporters, who accused him of waffling.

Mr. Christie took the opportunity of the compromise to strike back at his critics, saying that his position had always remained consistent. “Shame on all the people — shame on you — who accused me and others of playing politics with this issue,” he said. “You were wrong.”

The compromise bill will allow access to in-state tuition for immigrants without legal status who have graduated from a New Jersey high school after at least three years of attendance.

Mr. Christie said the legislation would become effective immediately, allowing students to take advantage of it in time for the spring semester.

Supporters of the measure cheered the agreement but vowed to continue pushing for legislation to allow some immigrants lacking legal status to receive state tuition assistance.

“Today is a historic day in New Jersey, but the fight is not over,” Udi Ofer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said in a statement.

“His veto will put up a roadblock for many of New Jersey’s best and brightest students who cannot afford the skyrocketing cost of a college education.”

Mr. Christie said on Thursday that he was concerned that opening state tuition assistance programs to undocumented immigrants would potentially turn New Jersey into what he called “a magnet state,” drawing out-of-state students wanting to take advantage of the state’s generosity. “I care about taking care of New Jersey kids,” he said, “whether they’re citizens or undocumented.”

Supporters of the legislation have argued that people brought to the country as children should not be penalized for their parents’ actions, and that increasing access to higher education will encourage more immigrants to excel in high school and add to the state’s highly skilled work force.

But opponents have feared that the measure would cost the state money and college slots that would otherwise go to help native-born students and immigrants with legal status.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

U. S. Deportations Down 10% in 2013

Wall Street Journal

By Laura Meckler

December 19, 2013

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303773704579268811765313676?KEYWORDS=immigration

The U.S. said Thursday it deported nearly 369,000 people who were in the country illegally or who were trying to cross the border without permission in 2013, down about 10% from a year earlier.

It marks the first drop in deportations after four-straight years of steady increases to record levels under the Obama administration.

The decline came because a greater number of the cases in 2013 involved criminals or people from Central America, which make them more complex to handle and require more agency resources, said John Sandweg, acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The report comes amid growing pressure on the Obama administration from immigration advocates to halt deportations, particularly of people who would qualify for legal status under legislation being considered by Congress. President Barack Obama has said he doesn't have authority to halt deportations unilaterally.

The administration said most of the removals in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 involved people apprehended at the border who were trying to enter the U.S., rather than people with established lives inside the country.

A total of 368,644 people were deported in fiscal year 2013. Of them, 235,093 were apprehended at the border, Thursday's report said.

Of the 133,551 people deported from the interior of the U.S., 82% previously had been convicted of a crime.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says it places a priority on deportations of people who have criminal convictions, repeat immigration violators and those considered threats to national security.

"ICE is committed to enforcing the nation's immigration laws in a smart, sensible manner," Mr. Sandweg said. He said that, overall, 98% of people removed met one of the enforcement priority categories.

The 2013 deportation numbers are comparable to 2008, President George W. Bush's last year in office, when 369,221 people were deported. The numbers under Mr. Obama had grown every year until last year's drop.

Immigration advocates said despite the drop, too many people are being deported.

"How much longer do we have to stand by and watch our families get torn apart by unscrupulous immigration agents?" asked Eddie Carmona, campaign manager for PICO National Network's Campaign for Citizenship, a network of religious groups. "It's well past the time for the Obama administration to provide our community the relief it needs and for Congress to pass immigration reform that puts an end to these egregious deportations once and for all."

The administration also has met criticism from Republicans, who say it hasn't enforced immigration law aggressively enough. These critics are particularly upset about the administration's decision last year to allow many people brought to the U.S. illegally as children legal harbor to stay, even though legislation providing for the same hasn't cleared Congress.

Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), a strong backer of enforcement, said Thursday that the administration is wrongly taking credit for removing people who were caught at the border.

"The painful irony is that the administration's catch-and-release policy—explained as an effort to focus removals on only the top-shelf priority cases—often means waiting until an illegal alien commits a violent offense and receives a felony criminal conviction before taking steps to remove that alien from the country," he said in an email message.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

U. S. Reports 10% Drop in Deportations

Los Angeles Times

By Brian Bennett

December 19, 2013

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-deportations-drop-20131220,0,4172504.story#axzz2o1KnxOu0

WASHINGTON — The number of immigrants deported from the country decreased this year for the first time since President Obama came into office, reflecting the impact of new policies intended to focus enforcement on immigrants with criminal backgrounds.

Both sides in the highly contentious debate over immigration policy seized on the annual figures released Thursday by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Advocates for immigrants, who have repeatedly criticized the administration for the high levels of deportations under Obama's tenure, said the approximately 369,000 immigrants deported in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 remained too many. Conservative groups denounced the decline as a sign of lax law enforcement.

In its five years so far, the Obama administration has removed nearly 2 million immigrants, the highest number of deportations under any president.

The roughly 10% decline from last year's record-high 409,849 deportations involved several changes in administration policy over the last two years. The change with the biggest effect, officials said, was the move to give higher priority to deporting immigrants with criminal records and multiple immigration violations. Finding and removing criminals in the country without visas takes longer than deportations in noncriminal cases, officials noted.

The totals "make clear that we are enforcing our nation's laws in a smart and effective way and meeting our enforcement priorities by focusing on convicted criminals," said John Sandweg, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A recent increase in the number of immigrants caught entering the U.S. illegally from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has also slowed the removals, because returning a deportee to Central America takes longer than sending a person back to Mexico, which remains home to the largest share of deportees, Sandweg told reporters.

As congressional action on immigration reform legislation has stalled over the last several months, immigrant advocates have been holding sit-ins and demonstrations at immigration offices across the country to pressure the Obama administration to stop deportations that split up families.

This week, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution calling on Obama to suspend deportations of all individuals who lack serious criminal histories, joining House Democrats who have asked the president to stop removals of any immigrants who would qualify for legalization under proposed immigration reform bills. A coalition of immigrant rights groups is pushing for the passage of similar resolutions in other major California cities.

The Senate passed an immigration bill in June that would create a 13-year pathway to citizenship for many of those in the country illegally as well as boost spending on border security by more than $30 billion. That legislation has stalled in the Republican-controlled House.

Republicans may take up a series of more narrowly framed immigration bills in the spring. The president has said he won't sign an immigration bill unless it includes a way for some of the 11 million people in the country without authorization or who overstayed their visas to eventually become U.S. citizens. The idea of a separate pathway to citizenship for people who entered the country illegally has become a sticking point for many House Republicans.

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday showed that changing the law to end the threat of deportation remains the top priority for Latinos. By 55% to 35%, Latinos polled said being able to live and work in the U.S. legally was more important than a pathway to citizenship. Among Latino immigrants who came to the U.S. legally, just 44% have become citizens, according to the Pew study.

Marshall Fitz, an immigration expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, said the decline in deportations this year was "encouraging." But the decrease, he said, was "not huge" and "there is still much more work to be done" to focus deportations on people who pose a threat to public safety.

Over Obama's tenure, the administration has moved away from raids on workplaces and has used criminal databases to help identify and deport people with criminal convictions. Of the people deported in the 2013 fiscal year, 216,810 had been previously convicted of a crime or immigration violation. That was 59% of all those removed, up from 31% five years ago.

But longtime immigration advocate Frank Sharry said that many people being deported were classified as criminals only because they had previously violated immigration laws and kept coming back into the country to be with their families

"They should be deporting people who have been convicted of crimes and a more carefully defined set of bad actors," Sharry said. "They've expanded what it means to be a criminal in order to justify the deportations; it is insulting to the immigrant community."

Similarly, Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles called the decline "a drop in the bucket" and said ICE should not deport people whose only crime was a previous immigration violation.

By contrast, conservative critics, who favor more deportations, said the new numbers proved the administration was not committed to policing the border.

"The Obama administration just isn't serious about enforcing our immigration laws," Kris Kobach, a lawyer and Kansas secretary of state who has filed lawsuits challenging the administration's immigration policy, said in a phone interview. "They seem to be looking for more and more categories of people not to deport."

Alonzo R. Peña, who was the No. 2 official at the immigration agency from 2008 to 2010, said ICE had decided at the beginning of the Obama administration to focus on arresting people who had criminal records and posed a danger to the community.

At the same time, immigration officials decided to increase deportations of newly arrived unauthorized immigrants. A decade ago, most of those recent border crossers would have been immediately returned without having the removal marked on their records. The number of people deported who were caught near the border has increased by 55% compared with five years ago. The increase corresponds with a surge in the number of Border Patrol agents.

"There are emotional factors when you remove someone who has children in schools and bought homes and are part of the community — those removals are more difficult," Peña said in a telephone interview.

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7 Immigrants Brought Here as Children Sue for In-State Virginia College Tuition Rates

Washington Post (Virginia)

By Justin Jouvenal

December 17, 2013

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/immigrant-students-in-va-seeking-in-state-college-tuition/2013/12/17/5329fd1a-6431-11e3-91b3-f2bb96304e34_story.html?tid=hpModule_99d5f542-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394

Giancarla Rojas is not an American citizen, but she has an American dream. The Falls Church resident, whose parents brought her here illegally from Bolivia as a child, has worked doggedly to become the first in her family to attend a four-year college.

She won a reprieve to stay in this country under an Obama administration initiative, maintains a 3.8 grade-point average at a community college and has a résumé packed with volunteer work, but George Mason University is still out of reach.

The 19-year-old cannot afford the out-of-state tuition of $29,000 a year Virginia charges people with her immigration status, so she and six other students filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Arlington County Circuit Court arguing that they should be able to pay the same lower rates as other longtime Virginia residents.

The lawsuit marks the latest flash point in a heated national debate over whether to grant the benefit to children brought here illegally. Maryland became one of at least 17 states to do so last year after vigorous opposition forced a referendum on a plan to grant in-state tuition discounts to undocumented college students. The issue is also the subject of litigation in Georgia and Arizona.

The lawsuit against the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), which sets policy for public colleges, could determine whether hundreds — even thousands — of students like Rojas attend college in the commonwealth and, if they do, how much debt they incur and how long it takes them to finish.

In-state tuition for Rojas at George Mason would be $9,900 — a third of the out-of-state rate.

“I always believed if you worked hard and got good grades, you could go to college,” Rojas said. “We are just like anyone else. We have been living in the United States for a long time.”

Specifically, the suit seeks in-state tuition rates at public colleges for those in the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, created after the DREAM Act failed in Congress.

DACA allows those who were brought here illegally as children to avoid deportation if they are enrolled in school, have a clean record and meet other criteria. They can also get Social Security numbers, apply for driver’s licenses in some states and have the right to work. It does not provide a path to citizenship and must be renewed every two years.

More than 7,000 young people had been granted DACA status in Virginia through the end of August, according to the suit, filed on behalf of the students by the Legal Aid Justice Center, based in Virginia. The plaintiffs argue that DACA is the equivalent of other immigration statuses that qualify for in-state tuition in Virginia.

SCHEV officials said their attorneys have told them otherwise, and school officials have written to students saying that such a plan would require the approval of the General Assembly.

“DACA is not a legal status,” said Lee Andes, assistant director for financial aid for SCHEV. “All it does is defer action.”

Bills that would have granted DACA students in-state tuition failed in the Virginia legislature this year, but similar efforts are expected to be taken up again in the next session.

A legislative analyst did not estimate the measure’s financial impact on schools, saying the number of undocumented students enrolled in Virginia colleges was unknown. But the analyst said schools might offset any potential financial losses by enrolling more out-of-state students.

Proponents argue that helping this group of young people attend college is the pragmatic course. Many have no plans to leave the United States and consider this country their home.

“By getting educations, they are much more likely to get integrated in the state, make money, pay taxes and buy houses,” said Jennifer Riddle, an advocacy attorney for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “Do we want to integrate them or create a second class?”

Opponents argue that educational resources — especially in difficult financial times — should be devoted to citizens and legal immigrants.

“It’s absurd that illegal aliens could go into court and force a state agency to recognize them as legal residents,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “It undermines the rule of law and provides a subsidy for students who are here illegally. Most taxpayers object to that.”

Rojas’s history is typical of many DACA recipients’. Her parents brought her to the United States as a 13-year-old. She and her 7-year-old sister were stopped at the border and detained, but they were eventually released and joined their parents in Northern Virginia.

Even though deportation proceedings against them began immediately, her parents enrolled her at Falls Church High School.

Rojas, who spoke only Spanish, said that simple homework assignments would take her hours and that she would stay up nights studying, but she was determined. She and her father would sing songs by the Beatles and Chicago in the car to practice English.

By 11th grade, she was in English honors classes. She tutored other immigrants in the language and helped them prepare for the citizenship test at the Arlington Boulevard Community Development Organization (ABCD).

In 12th grade, she approached a school counselor to discuss college options. Until then, she had carefully kept the secret of her illegal status from everyone.

“He told me, ‘There’s nothing you can do. Students like you don’t go to college,’ ” Rojas recalled.

She said the encounter spurred her to action. She began networking with other undocumented students in college and got her DACA status, which staved off deportation proceedings.

She applied for 30 scholarships to get money to attend Northern Virginia Community College, since federal loans are not available to undocumented students. Still, she pays $322 per credit hour, more than double the in-state rate.

Despite the hard work, Rojas’s grip on her dream remains tenuous. Robbie Snow, the community coordinator at ABCD, said it would be a shame if Rojas did not attend George Mason.

“You don’t want someone like her flipping burgers in McDonald’s,” Snow said. “You want her working for the betterment of the state.”

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Immigration Remakes and Sustains New York, Report Finds

New York Times (New York)

By Kirk Semple

December 18, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/nyregion/chinese-diaspora-transforms-new-yorks-immigrant-population-report-finds.html

He arrived in the United States in 1988, an uneducated 21-year-old from rural Fujian Province, China. With the help of smugglers he made his way to Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, found work in a variety of restaurants and, in time, managed to get a green card.

Within the next several years, the man, Mr. Wang, was joined in New York by numerous relatives: cousins, uncles and aunts. Some came on family-related visas, others sneaked in, and still others were given asylum. There were marriages and children, the roots of the family tree pushing deeper into American soil. His extended family in the United States now numbers in the scores, many of them living in the Chinese enclaves of New York City.

“I can’t count how many there are,” said Mr. Wang, who now lives in Flushing, Queens, and tends a wok in a Chinese restaurant. He requested that his full name not be used because of his immigration history.

The migratory experience of the Wang family is part of a larger narrative that is transforming the city: the tremendous growth of the Chinese population over the past several decades. Now the second-largest foreign-born group in the city, Chinese are on the verge of overtaking immigrants from the Dominican Republic for the top spot.

The evolution of the Chinese diaspora is one of the stories of New York explored in a new report by the City Planning Department that provides a detailed statistical analysis of the city’s ever-shifting immigrant population, charting where the most recent arrivals have come from, where they have settled, the jobs they have taken and their effects on the economy.

Called The Newest New Yorkers, the 235-page report is the fifth edition of a study first released in 1992. It is intended as a reference for policy makers, planners and service providers, its authors said, “to help them gain perspective on a population that continues to reshape the city.”

Now numbering about 3.1 million — a record high — the city’s immigrant population, about 37 percent of the overall population of 8.2 million New Yorkers, is more kaleidoscopic than ever, in large part a result of the passage of 1965 immigration legislation that allowed more people to come from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. In a city that once had a population of predominantly European origin, there is now no dominant racial, ethnic or nationality group.

“New York arguably boasts the most diverse population of any major city in the world because of the flow of immigrants from across the globe,” the report said.

This arrival of immigrants in the past four decades has helped to bolster the city’s economy and usher in “an era of renewal and growth” after the economic slump in the 1970s that saw the loss of 10 percent of the general population, noted the report, which was written by Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division of the City Planning Department, and Arun Peter Lobo, the division’s deputy director.

Dominicans have made up the city’s largest immigrant group since 1990 and currently number about 380,200 residents. But Chinese, who have held the No. 2 spot for that period, are close behind, with 350,200. While the Dominican population has grown about 3 percent in the past decade, the Chinese population has grown 34 percent. China was also the single largest source of legally admitted immigrants in New York City from 2002 to 2011, with more than 40 percent of them granted asylum, said the report, which was largely based on Census Bureau data as well other federal and city administrative data.

“China seems to be surging,” Mr. Salvo said. The data, he added, “points to China ultimately becoming the largest source of immigrants to New York.”

Still, the rate of growth among Chinese pales in comparison with the growing number of Mexicans. In the past decade, the Mexican population has surged by 52 percent, the largest spurt of any group among the 10 largest immigrant groups in the city, pushing Mexicans over Guyanese and Jamaicans and moving them into third place. They now number about 186,000.

Ecuador, Haiti, India, Russia, Tobago and Trinidad rounded out the top 10 countries of origin.

Queens and Brooklyn continued to support the biggest and most highly concentrated immigrant populations, yet the Bronx and Staten Island had a surge in foreign-born residents in recent years. From 2000 to 2011, the Bronx’s foreign-born population increased by about 85,300, the largest growth of any borough, while Staten Island’s immigrant population grew 36 percent, the largest percentage increase of any borough.

Queens has the most immigrants of any borough, with 1.09 million, or nearly half of its residents; Brooklyn followed with 946,500 — or 37 percent of the borough’s overall population — with nearly half of them living in neighborhoods straddling the B/Q and N subway lines, which swoop in a vague U-shape through the western and southern reaches of the borough.

Bensonhurst, located along that arc, emerged in the past decade as the neighborhood with the second-largest immigrant population in the city, behind Washington Heights in Manhattan and ahead of Elmhurst in Queens. But Bushwick, in the northern part of Brooklyn, far from those subway lines, experienced the highest growth rate, with its immigrant population increasing by 21 percent. (The demographers also noted that this surge occurred in parallel with an increase in migration to the neighborhood among the native-born from elsewhere in the country.)

As for the immigrants’ effects on the city’s economy, the demographers said, the foreign-born make up 47 percent of all employed residents and are disproportionately represented among those who start new businesses, “providing a continuous injection of economic vitality” and driving demand for housing.

“If history is any indication,” the report said, “the economic opportunities in New York will continue to sustain its immigrant flow.”

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

City Sees Wave of Newcomers

Wall Street Journal (New York)

By Sophia Hollander

December 18, 2013

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303773704579266431847188194#printMode

New York City's immigrant population hit a new high of slightly more than three million in 2011, propelled by sharp spikes in Mexican and Chinese-born residents in the past decade, according to an analysis of the most recent census data by the Department of City Planning.

The comprehensive analysis, undertaken by city planners over the past year, revealed a shifting city population dominated by newcomers: More than one third of the city's immigrants arrived since 2000. Wednesday's release of the data was coupled with a new interactive map on the city planning website that allows users to analyze neighborhood data and trace settlement patterns.

"Immigrants certainly build neighborhoods," said Joseph Salvo, director of the population division at the Department of City Planning. "We want to help people who help the city and that's where the value is here because this does not exist."

Like many other New Yorkers, the newcomers have scoured corners of the city searching for bargains, treading into unfamiliar neighborhoods as they searched for a foothold. Although Brooklyn and Queens remained the undisputed immigrant hubs, the city's foreign-born population grew fastest in the Bronx (up 22.1%) and Staten Island (up 35.5%) since the last analysis in 2000.

The international immigrants were joined by more people moving into New York from across the U.S., officials said. Increasingly, both groups of new arrivals found themselves attracted to the same frontier neighborhoods—made more appealing by reduced crime and new development over the past decade. The city's fastest-growing immigrant neighborhood since 2000? Bushwick.

Still, the outlines of the immigrant story—journeys that have shaped the city's fate for generations—still hold, officials said.

"It's an evolutionary change as opposed to revolutionary," said Arun Peter Lobo, deputy director of city planning's population division. "Similar stories, new players."

Only 16% of the city's foreign population was born in Europe, down from 64% in 1970. Overall, around 6 in 10 new Yorkers are immigrants or children of immigrants.

Although the city's largest immigrant group still hails from the Dominican Republic, that population increased only 3% since 2000. By contrast, the city's Mexican-born population grew by 52% and its Chinese-born population increased by 33.9%.

For the Chinese, many may have been living here already. In 2005, the U.S. eliminated its annual cap on green cards granted to people seeking asylum. Until then, thousands who escaped to the U.S. were living here in legal limbo.

Around 42% of the nearly 170,000 Chinese immigrants to New York between 2002 and 2011 were asylees. Many cited China's one child policy, said Peter Kwong, a professor of Asian-American studies and urban planning at Hunter College. Overall, 72,000 Chinese immigrants who received asylum became legal permanent residents of New York City between 2000 and 2011—compared with 3,933 during the 1990s.

The new Chinese immigrants hail from a wider set of regions and include a mix of working class and professionals, Mr. Kwong said. That variety has impacted the city's broader culture.

"Chinese cuisine has diversified," Mr. Kwong said.

The sheer numbers have also pushed Chinese immigrants beyond the borders of the city's traditional Chinatowns, into new neighborhoods like Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

"It just seems to be that the Chinese are really particularly accelerating," Mr. Kwong said.

New York also experienced a striking increase in the number of immigrants becoming citizens.

The naturalization rate rose from 44.5% to 52.1%, the result a multiyear strategy, officials said. Citizenship is required for certain jobs, including becoming policemen or firefighters, and tends to lead to greater rates of homeownership and financial success, they said.

"It is that moment when someone fully adopts and embraces the reality of being an American and participating fully," said Fatima Shama, the city's commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs.

Ms. Shama's office targeted city workers and public school parents, offering them free legal advice and providing information on the naturalization process. The city also joined with a local credit union to provide immigrants with a microloan to cover the $680 fee and help them open savings accounts.

"We really tried to build it out in a holistic sense," Ms. Shama said

In the past decade, more than two-thirds of people moving to New York came from other parts of the U.S.—and settled alongside immigrants from around the world, forming new mixed communities. In the place of immigrant enclaves has risen a series of integrated neighborhoods where immigrant families live side-by-side with young, childless hipsters.

"All you've got to do is go into Steinway Street in Astoria—go into anyone of the lunch places just watch; you'll see an Ecuadorean family restaurant serving young people in large numbers and immigrants." Mr. Salvo said. "It's side by side in a lot of places."

Overall, the data affirmed the city's fundamental character, he said.

"One of the reasons we do well is such a regular injection of vitality from immigrants," Mr. Salvo said. "Opportunities are holding people where they didn't in the past."

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