From the New York Times:
Professor Diner also noted the tendency to compare Jews and Italians –- whose peak immigration numbers occurred at roughly the same period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — though she drew some important distinctions. Italian migration early on was heavily male, and some one-third of Italians returned to Italy. Jewish migration was more evenly split between men and women, and returning to anti-Semitic communities in Europe was impossible.
Italians largely came from agricultural backgrounds, whereas Jews were more likely to come from industrial and urban backgrounds. Their relatively higher skills and literacy accelerated their move out of the industrial workforce and into small independent businesses. Both Italians and Jews, Professor Diner said, tended to work for their ethnic kinsmen.
“New York never became the center of Italian life in the United States,” Professor Diner said, while “Jews, on the other hand, also arrived in overwhelming numbers in New York and most of them never left.”
Joseph J. Salvo, the director of the Population Division at the Department of City Planning and one of New York’s leading demographers, spoke next.
He traced the “profound shift” in immigrant population patterns since the 1965 immigration law ended the quota system that had barred most immigrants since the 1920s.
In 1970, 18.2 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born; by 2005, 36.6 percent were.
In 1970, the leading countries of origin for the city’s foreign-born were Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, Ireland, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the United Kingdom, Australia and Jamaica. By 2000, the list had changed: the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Colombia.
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