Abstract
As during the previous globalization era, immigration from abroad provided the impetus for New York City’s robust growth around the turn of the twenty-first century. It was the rapidly growing, diverse local immigrant communities that created the demand for new, locally supplied goods and services. And it was the rapidly growing immigrant communities that provided the elastic supply of labor that facilitated broader economic expansion.
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- 1.
Some of the literature summarized in this section focuses specifically on immigrants from Jamaica. Roger Waldinger, however, discusses “West Indian” New Yorkers, a group that includes English-speaking immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and, in some instances, French- or Kreyol-speaking Haitians. About 60% of New Yorkers who hail from the formerly British West Indies are Jamaican.
- 2.
“Other Hispanic” refers to individuals who were born in or descended from someone born in a Spanish-speaking country other than Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Cuba.
- 3.
In computing this statistic Logan, Zhang, and Alba defined an ethnic neighborhood as “a set of contiguous [census] tracts, which must contain at least one tract where a group is represented as 40% or more of the residents and whose other tracts each have a level of ethnic concentration among residents of at least 35%” (Logan et al., 2001, p. 304).
- 4.
Categorizing Guyana with this group is a little problematic for two reasons. First, the country is situated on the South American mainland. Second, like Trinidad and Tobago, a large proportion of its population—40% in 2012 in Guyana and 35% in Trinidad and Tobago—is of South Asian origin. The Indo-Guyanese enclave will be discussed briefly below. African-Guyanese tend to gravitate to diverse African-Caribbean neighborhoods.
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Gurwitz, A. (2019). A City of Niches and Enclaves. In: Atlantic Metropolis. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_19
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