Chinese Immigrants Are Now New York City’s Largest Foreign Born Group. Here’s What That Means.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. This wave of immigrants that's really driven the expansion has come since the 80s through a human smuggling network that moved people from Southeast China into the U.S. early on, and then a number of immigration reforms. People began to get green cards and settle into New York City. Chinese immigrants have surpassed Dominicans as the largest foreign-born population in the Big Apple. On today's show, we look into the growth of New York City's Chinese community. But before we get into that, here are a few headlines we're watching. Finally, there's a plan to cool sweltering subway stations, and it involves something called geothermal technology. Mayor Zohrammandani explains it as technology that will use thermal energy to suck heat out of subway stations and store it in nearby buildings for the winter season. Sounds complicated, but not impossible, I guess. The mayor says this study will cost about $800,000 and will start at the Brooklyn Bridge City Hall and Chamber Street Station Complex. Don't look for relief right now. Design work will begin in 2027. Gotta be honest, all this time, I thought the Wu-Tang flag was the unofficial flag for Staten Island. But apparently not. The borough has another flag that could soon become legit under New York City law. The newer flag has a beige background with a colorful circular seal in the center. Inside the seal, a woman holds a downturned sword in a shield with two turtle doves as she looks out over a ship in a boat on the water. The words Staten Island and City of New York wrap all the way around the image. But I guess there wasn't space for the words Wutang Forever. A city council committee will vote on the bill to make Staten Island's flag official on Thursday. Another vote the city council is set to take this week involves outdoor dining and making it a year-round fixture again. The proposal would also let restaurants weatherproof the structures for colder months. Right now, those street setups are only allowed from April through November. For more of what's happening in and around New York City, visit our news site Gothamist.

Thousands of people gathered in Manhattan Sunday for the annual Dominican Day parade. Mayor Zohran Mamdani called it one of the city's largest cultural festivities. There's nothing quite like the sound of Basha, the aroma of Sancocho as it fills our city streets, the joy of New Yorkers coming together to celebrate a heritage that is so integral to our city's history. Since the 1990s, Dominicans have been the largest immigrant group in New York City. They anchor iconic neighborhoods like Washington Heights and large parts of the Bronx. But, unfortunately, the Dominican population is declining here. That's according to a new report by the Department of City Planning. Now, Chinese immigrants hold the top spot as the city's biggest foreign-born population. The report, done just once a decade, puts the Chinese population at 397,000. That's up 5% since 2013. Over that same stretch, the Dominican population fell 6% to 390,000. I know what you're thinking. Does this even matter? Yes. Yes, it does, my friend. These counts help decide which communities get funding for things like language access and health care. So what's behind these shifts? And what do they reveal about how the Big Apple is taking shape around us? Joining me now is Kenneth Guest, a professor at CUNY's Baruch College who spent decades studying immigrant communities in New York City, including in his book, God in Chinatown. Professor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's delightful to be here. I want to start with your book. I think it will help us get to where we need to be in this conversation. Tell me about God and Chinatown. Well, God and Chinatown was my earliest research on Chinese immigration into New York City. I learned from a professor during graduate work while I was working on my PhD that there was a whole new wave of Chinese immigrants coming from mainland China, from Southeast China, an area called Fujo. And they were beginning to transform. Manhattan's Chinatown and gradually build out Sunset Park and to some extent at that early stage flushing as well. So that was a great opportunity for me. I immediately began to do some field work, walked the streets. I was particularly interested in religion. So I began to explore the new immigrant population through the lens of their religious communities. People in general told me that the Chinese were not religious. I myself had a... personal experience of living in Beijing while I was an undergraduate. And even in the 80s, there were churches and mosques, Buddhist temples, people practicing their religious traditions. And so I knew that that wasn't an accurate description. So I thought, well, let me just take a...

a few weeks and try to walk every street in Chinatown Manhattan and see what I find. Yeah. And I found 65 religious communities in Manhattan's Chinatown. And that was really a fascinating revelation to me. And also part of what came out of that early research was, and I recognition that people were organizing their religious communities around... home area or our language. So not all Chinese were going to all churches or all mosques or all, you know, temples. The churches were organized around language use, for instance. And this new Chinese population from Fujo speaks a particular dialect, Fujonese, and that is... that's distinct from Mandarin and distinct from Cantonese, mutually unintelligible, in fact. Okay. So, you know, for those immigrants coming with Fugnese language skills to be able to find a religious community with other people from Fujo, who also spoke the same dialect, and often from the same hometown, the same home region, that was just an amazing opportunity for them to find an entry point. into American life into Chinatown. So that's where God and Chinatown came from. Part of the study also involved returning to the home villages of many of these immigrants because I couldn't quite understand why everybody was coming. So many people said to me, well, we're here, but everybody else in the village is coming. What's going on? What's going on here? So I realized I had to go back home. to understand the conditions at home, to see what was happening there. So I made many, many trips to Fujo, lived in villages, visited temples, churches, and gotten to see, you know, the differential economic opportunities. I love your research. Thank you so much. Love the research. Honestly, I want to go back now, you know, before you even started college, where did this fascination with Chinese communities come from? Well, the deep history is that my grandparents were Methodist missionaries in India, China, and the Philippines. And so they traveled in China in the 1930s. And so it was somewhere deep in my psyche, I suppose, a lot of conversations about that. They were... pretty much thrown out of every country they were in because of their alliance with the independence movements. But they were deeply involved with the Chinese community in the Philippines. And when I was in high school, my mom decided to... take me to the Philippines to see where they had lived, and then we went to Hong Kong. And that's sort of the... Your Genesis story, I suppose. Part of my Genesis story. Yeah, absolutely. And then when I was in college, I had a chance to take a language, and I narrowed it down to Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and Chinese fit my schedule. Love it. I know your book got in Chinatown came out in the early 2000s, and it seems like you've learned so much through your research and your writing.

Are you surprised by this continued sort of great migration of Chinese immigrants here in New York City? No. This is a pattern, a system that's developed over the last 40 years, built on an earlier wave of immigrants from South China, from Canton, from Guangzhou. And so this wave of immigrants that's really driven the expansion has come since the 80s. initiated through a human smuggling network that moved people from southeast China into the U.S. early on, and then a number of immigration reforms. People began to get green cards and settle into New York City. become citizens, bring relatives using the kind of chain migration that's possible through our immigration laws. And that system is still in place not only for the migration process, but once arriving, there's an elaborate economic and social network that allows people to plug right in and find their way. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more because, you know, New York City plays this role of being this social hub and job incubator for a large diaspora. of Chinese immigrants. Can you talk more about that? Sure. It's a social science study of immigration. One of the things we look at historically are immigrant ethnic enclaves. Certainly the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1880s, 1890s, early 20th century was an ethnic enclave for immigrants coming from Eastern Europe, Jewish community. A lot of times people came and organized their social, religious, economic life around what we call social capital. They found ways of mobilizing a set of resources. When they didn't have any money, they were able to mobilize a set of social capital. Resources that allowed them to draw on hometown networks, family networks, religious networks, co-language networks, to find jobs, to find housing, make their way. And so we think of ethnic conclays as places where people live and work. Right. And that economic piece of it is huge. So it's not just a residential area, but it's also where people build out ethnic oriented. economic opportunities as well. And I'm thinking off the top of the dome here, restaurants, nail salons, right? You've got it. Absolutely. And in the early days, construction trades were also a big thing and garment shops. So those were the big poles. Social scientists think of migration as having pushes and poles. They're not random. Very few people actually move in life. in the world. Yeah. But if you do move, it tends to be because something really pushed you. And then where you choose to go tends to be because there's something that really pulled you. Yeah. And that's the ethnic enclave and its opportunities pull people here. We're going to take a pause here, but when we return, Professor Guest talks about communities outside of Manhattan's Chinatown that Chinese immigrants now call home. Stick around.

This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Senator Bernie Sanders on the widespread concerns about AI data centers. They are conservatives. They are progressives. They are moderates. And they're saying, what the hell are we doing? Why am I aiding these large corporations owned by the wealthiest people in the world who could care less about me? Bernie Sanders on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with Professor Kenneth Gess, who studies immigrant communities across the five boroughs. Before the break, he talked about how New York City plays this role of being a social hub and job incubator for a large diaspora of Chinese immigrants. But that goes beyond just Chinatown. Let's talk about where these communities have chosen to go. Of course, we know when you think about Manhattan, Chinatown comes to mind, right? But I'm wondering how much of that has changed as far as people being pushed out because of affordability. Absolutely. Manhattan's Chinatown was the original hub and expanded dramatically in the 80s in early 90s until it really bumped up into a lot of wealthier neighborhoods. And so they're... It was hard for folks to find more affordable housing. And so then people began to follow the B and the D and the N and the R subway lines out to Brooklyn. Sunset Park. Exactly. And that's how we get to Sunset Park. And so we began to see a Sunset Park, which was also a struggling neighborhood that had really... been hit hard by the 1970s fiscal crisis and people moving out. And so there was available housing stock and space to start small businesses. And so people began to use Sunset Park as a place to live and to do some small businesses. They commute back into Chinatown to find the employment agencies. Once New York City was saturated with Chinese restaurants, entrepreneurs in this immigrant group began to look at towns outside of New York City to start Chinese restaurants. Gotcha. Then they began to create the... bus lines, starting with vans, to move workers. Dollar vans? Is this where the dollar vans come from? Well, the dollar vans also were part of moving people around from Manhattan into Brooklyn and into Queens. But these are more long-distance ones. Now they run lines to Miami and Wisconsin and Maine and all over the country to move workers, restaurant supplies, back and forth. You know, you quickly mentioned Queens. I just want to say, flushing looks completely different now, right? It does. Flushing, I think of it as an Asia town rather than just a China town. It's so many different Asian populations, and it tends to be a little more middle class. It's where a lot of the new immigrants move once they've been able to establish themselves a little bit more, buying a home, finding some kind of professional occupation. Moving on up like the Jefferson's. Maybe that's what it is. You know, this count happened before the second Trump president.

Why is that important? Well, it captures a particular moment. And so I know that... Some more recent data has come in that shows an even larger number of Chinese here in New York over the last five years, an additional increase. So really during the first Trump presidency, we saw a tapering off of the immigration from China, a slowing down as people were concerned about anti-immigrant sentiment. And then that really shut down during COVID. Yeah. That was, I mean, China shut down, so it was very hard for people internally to move. And then the international piece became a very, very difficult journey. What we've seen since COVID, however, is a reopening of that migration flow into New York City. So certainly in the first half of the 2020s, significant numbers of Chinese have continued to flow into New York. I was in Brooklyn maybe a year and a half, two years ago. with a meeting with some religious leaders and who were starting to provide some social services to different people. And they were asking me why so many people were coming across the southern border and being bused to New York and staying at hotels that the city was providing. There are no Chinese in those hotels. They couldn't quite figure out why folks needed to go to those hotels. And what we were seeing is that the Chinese have such an elaborate system of ethnic support. They don't need the hotels. That they were plugging into that. And a lot of these new immigrants were coming from areas where when they got to New York, there wasn't an extensive immigrant support network. within their own community. So that was the very, very different kinds of receiving communities and infrastructure within the receiving communities. What do you think, I don't know, the next decade will look like? That's hard to tell given the current immigration status here in the U.S., right, in terms of how immigration flows are going to be affected by that. It's clear to me that there will continue to be a strong immigration flow from China. Part of that is there's work to be done here in the U.S., so there's a poll. And these folks that I study primarily from Fujo are labor immigrants. They come to work in restaurants. Maybe they are able to turn around and become entrepreneurs and have their own restaurants. And so those are opportunities that require.

not a lot of startup capital. And business knowledge you can acquire by going to work in a restaurant for a while or a nail salon for a while. So I think we will continue to see that flow. I think it's also important when we think about any of these immigrant populations and the Chinese in particular to think about class within the population. So not all Chinese are coming from the same class background. into New York. So my professor Peter Kwong referred to it as uptown Chinese and downtown Chinese. That's what I had in mind. And so the downtown Chinese referring to working class folks and uptown Chinese who are the professionals. And so there is a, when you look at the general statistics in the study by New York City, they are... their averages that include both of those components, both the professional and the working class. So there is a professional immigration also into the city in terms of folks coming into healthcare, into sciences, into computer sciences. And so we'll see what the impact of the attacks on universities and international students. will also have on the immigration of young people coming to study here who then very much wanted to stay and build careers. I was walking on the west side over the weekend on a pier and there were three Chinese gentlemen fishing. And I started talking to them in Chinese, and they were, of course, quite surprised that we could have that conversation. But they came because their children had come to the U.S. as students, become professionals, and then they had brought their parents. So they were not from Fujo. They were from central China, Shandong. One of them was from northeast China, Harbin. And so... there's also that migration flow. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I'm thinking now on the other end of that, right, like Chinese immigrants who have come over and started a family, those now first generation Chinese Americans are going on to... Live a lovely life, hopefully here in New York City. It's been part of the pleasure of studying this community over 30 years is to watch the evolution of the community. And part of that is in terms of the intergenerationality of it. So it's been my pleasure over the last few years to work with a whole group of Fujunis second generation immigrants. Their parents immigrated. And the children worked in restaurants and grew up in the restaurants. And then they went to college.

And so they are young professionals, and they are really exploring what it means to be a second generation group here in the United States. What does it mean to grow up as children of restaurant workers, of garment shop workers, of nail salon workers, then to achieve a level of professional success educationally and in their early careers and still want to. think about how to be of service to the Chinese community. And that's been exciting. We held our first conference with that group at Baruch, Ma University, a couple of years ago, and they're going to have their fourth annual conference coming up later this summer. I love to hear that, actually, you know, as much as this report is good news for Chinese immigrants, on the other end of this, the Dominican population here in New York City declined 6%. And for years now, they held that top spot since the 90s. But for years now, you know, we've seen the growth of Dominican political power in places like the Bronx and Manhattan. Dominicans have had the largest foreign-born group, as I mentioned, since the 90s here. And over that time, you know, we've seen that growth of Dominican political power. But I am wondering, are we seeing that same growth politically in... Chinese communities for Chinese New Yorkers? I think we're beginning to see it. It's slowly. The political process is happening within the community and building local infrastructure. There are hometown associations that meet on a regular basis, people from the same hometowns. Those have formed regional associations. And there, the Fujinese American Association, the Chinese Benevolute Association are navigating the political world with New York City politicians and beginning to see some. elected officials, John Liu, of course. One of the challenges for the Chinese in New York City is that I would say most of the new immigrants are working class folks and coming from China where political participation was not something anyone sought. It was not a, what you wanted to do was stay as far away as possible from that. So it's a cultural turn to begin to think about how to mobilize. into a political process here in the United States and in New York City. And then I think the language challenge is really huge. I did a study of at Baruch a few years ago of our Fujanese students. We found that only 50% of their parents had gone to high school. And so, you know, just not a lot of educational background. And linguistically, most of them were still using Fujonis at home. And even at Baruch, they were using Fujunis to mobilize friend groups to help each other with school. With schoolwork. And then they'd go to Mandarin and then English. So there's still a challenge of operating in a primarily monolinguistic environment or maybe there are two primary languages in New York City.

That's beyond my expertise. So it will come. Kenneth Gess is a professor at CUNY's Baruch College. Thanks so much for laying this out for us and giving me a better understanding of how this Chinese immigrant group has taken the top spot for foreign-born immigrants in New York City. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.