New York Final Destination

When Henry James sailed out of New York harbor for Europe in 1875, Ellis Island, to his right, was just an empty rock, and the city he left behind was ethnically familiar. When he returned for a visit three decades later, everything had changed. Into the city had come millions of people from Ireland and Italy, Jews from all over Europe, Danes, Swedes, Finns and the rest. James was astonished at the polyglot place his old New York had become, at the "hotch-potch of racial ingredients" on the city's streets.

James saw the very crest of the great immigrant wave. At the turn of the century, four out of every ten New Yorkers were foreign born. That fraction declined steadily -- until the past decade. Now, once again, New York City is America's melting pot. Today, local planning officials estimate, 2.1 million of the city's 7.1 million residents are from overseas, some 30%, a larger proportion than at any time since the 1940s. There are more Dominicans (an estimated 350,000) than in any city but Santo Domingo, more Haitians (225,000) than anywhere but Port au Prince, more Greeks (100,000) than anywhere but Athens. New York has more Jamaicans (275,000), Russians (100,000) and Chinese (200,000), it seems sure, than any city outside Jamaica, the U.S.S.R., China and Taiwan. Los Angeles and Miami have a higher percentage of foreign- born residents, but neither can match New York's ethnic depth and breadth: not only does the city have nearly every immigrant group imaginable, each group is quite large. Even the smaller ethnic communities are sizable: the city has more Ethiopian residents (3,000) than several states have black people.

Mongrel New York, always a port of entry and always a slightly hysterical place, is now becoming even more eclectic, more jazzed up and redolent. Manhattan has a Ukrainian neighborhood that overlaps Polish and Puerto Rican sections, Brooklyn a Lebanese quarter just north of formerly Scandinavian, now Hispanic, Sunset Park. In the Balkanized Astoria neighborhood -- one part of one borough -- there are some 5,000 Croatians from Yugoslavia; 1,800 Colombians; 6,200 immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In the Flushing section of Queens, a few miles east, there are 38,000 Koreans. Before he explored his new neighborhood recently, one Flushing resident fresh from India had been expecting a blonder, Wonder Bread community, like Des Moines, maybe, or Tacoma. "It wasn't America," he says of northeastern Queens. "It was the U.N. I saw Colombians, Koreans, Chinese, Dominican Republicans -- but not a single hamburger!"

Why do they come to New York? For one thing, the city has a tradition of tolerance, or at least a laissez-faire obliviousness, which amounts to the same thing. Partly too, it is the reassurance of being among one's own kind. * An immigrant from almost any country can depend on finding transplanted countrymen in the city. But there is also something appealing, it seems, about joining the larger swarm of immigrants in New York, of being on a patch that is in turn part of a patchwork quilt. Where practically everyone is an alien, no one is alien. "There is a feeling of cordiality," says Anand Mohan, a Queens College politics professor from India, "and, for us, a satisfaction in knowing that as immigrants in this city, we are not alone."