Watching the Demographic Ebbs and Flows

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and after nearly three decades as New York, city's chief demographer at the department of city planning, Joe Salvo has just retired. You may have heard him on this show throughout the years when he's come on to explain the census or to discuss the newest New Yorkers report, which tracks who was coming to the city, or answer other questions about who we actually are in New York city. Joe was kind enough to sit with us now for an exit interview and Joe, we so appreciate this. Congratulations on your retirement and welcome back to WNYC.

Joe Salvo: Good morning, Brian. It's great to be here again, and please put the quotes around the word retirement for me.

Brian Lehrer: Meaning what? What are you going to do?

Joe Salvo: I'm not sure yet, but I'm looking to stay in the game on census and on New York City demographic issues for sure.

Brian Lehrer: Good. Keep us apprised of what you do because you always come up with interesting stuff and why does the city have a chief demographer? What did you keep track of primarily and why?

Joe Salvo: We monitor the trends that affect everything from putting programs in the field, figuring out how to spend dollars most effectively on particular programs. You need to know who is here. You need to know the trends in the city's population, whether we're growing, where the growth is slowing as it has been actually for the last few years. What neighborhoods are changing, how they're changing, all those things affect planning, they affect the distribution of resources and decisions the city needs to make and remember, New York city is the size of some countries, so having a staff to do this kind of analysis is really very important.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a biggest single demographic change that you would cite from when you started almost 30 years ago to today?

Joe Salvo: I would say the ebb and flow of immigrants has been a key factor. I grew up in the 1970s. I came of age actually in the 1970s into the 1980s and I saw what happened in the city and what was going on when the city was literally broke but the city came back and it came back largely because of people coming here from the rest of the world. I saw the impact and the power that that had into the 1980s and the 1990s, directly through the presence of immigrants and indirectly through the children of those immigrants and the jobs and the economic vitality that exists in so many of the cities neighborhoods.

I watched Flushing, Queens. I used to go into a Madison Square Garden in the '70s and in the early '80s and come up to a subway station where there was no one, where it was desolate, would not be an exaggeration and then I watched those neighborhoods come back and coming back on the heels of people coming to New York. It's the cycling of people, to answer your question, that is the key to the dynamism that we feel those of us who are New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: In a recent interview with the New York Times, I saw you say, "If you asked me what the real threat to the city is, I will tell you the real threat is that we've stop attracting immigrants." How much has it been on the decline and since when?

Joe Salvo: Well, early last decade, the city experienced a big surge in population growth. We had immigration and we had migration from the rest of the country, a lot of young, highly educated people were coming here. Then around the middle of the decade, 2015, 2016, we peaked with our immigrant numbers and since 2016, the number of immigrants in New York has gone down by 46%.

Brian Lehrer: What?

Joe Salvo: The number of immigrants coming to New York, excuse me, that's the right way to put it, coming to New York each year is down 46%. That is the real danger. That is the real threat and as a result of that, remember, we're an aging city so we have more deaths by virtue of aging and then immigrants have children, about half the births in the city or to immigrant women. If you lower the number of immigrants and an aging population, you get population decline. Before COVID, the city was actually showing declines in population from year to year.

Brian Lehrer: Was it a Trump thing?

Joe Salvo: It's connected to federal immigration policy for sure. We do not in New York city control what the federal government does, and if the federal government creates an environment of hostility towards immigrants and those immigrants do not come here, we all suffer.

Brian Lehrer: What percentage of the population as a reference point would you say is currently immigrants or their children?

Joe Salvo: It's easily 55% of the total, 37% foreign born and then about 55%, that first and second generation. The foreign born alone are over three million in the city, three million foreign born. That's bigger than the population of Chicago.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have stats in your head on the change over time of what percentage of New Yorkers live below the poverty line or who those New Yorkers are? Because I'm curious from your perch as chief demographer if you'd been able to see the rich get richer or concentration of wealth in any way.

Joe Salvo: We study socioeconomic characteristics and there's no question that there's been an increase in inequality in the city. Inequity has certainly become a major issue for good reason and we do observe, we do look at the socioeconomic characteristics of the population. We look at people who are working, involvement in the workforce and when you look at the overall poverty rate for the city, it's in the range of around 20% of the city's population.

Then when you look at the native-born and the foreign-born populations, what you see is that a lot of people who come here have high labor force participation, people come here to work, okay and we need to maintain that. That is very important and obviously now with COVID, the impact on a lot of those jobs, we've all been reading about it, those jobs that immigrants take, those jobs that sustain immigrant families. It's often said that New York City suffers because of its density. I disagree with that statement.

It's because of overcrowding in households. It's large families living in small apartments who don't have options regarding work. Many of those people had to go out and in the middle of COVID and work to feed their families and so we have situations like that where people are trying to keep their head above water combined with extreme wealth in other parts of the city. Some of it very extreme but in parts of the city where there is that wealth, we saw people leave.

I believe most of that movement out is temporary. People will come back or in fact, are coming back but that gives you an illustration of how COVID affected the population. On the one end people without resources and losing their jobs, trying to feed themselves. On the other hand, people being able to go to second homes and going to other places and believe me, that's a wonderful option if you have it perhaps but it is an option only open to a certain segment of the population. That's a good way of demonstrating, frankly the split that we have in the city, the inequality.

Brian Lehrer: You just said, people are starting to come back. Do you have any really recent data on that? Because I think what we still hear casually in the media is still, oh, hundreds of thousands of people have left New York, those with the means to be able to do so, as you were just describing. Now, do you have any numbers on people coming back?

Joe Salvo: I do not have anything definitive. I'm basing this on the history and that I've studied over the course of time in the city's population, the problems that existed in the '70s and in the '80s, the crack epidemic, for example, the 9/11. I admit it, it is a hope on my part. I'm a scientist. I base my observations on data, but very soon, Brian, we're going to know the answer to these questions because there are going to be two pieces of data that will be coming out in the next few months.

One will be an estimate of the city's population as of July 2020. In other words, after the pandemic started and the other will be the census count as of April 1, 2020. The first count of the July 2020 pop will be out in about a month-and-a-half, two months, and then midsummer we're going to get the census population of the city So that will tell us a lot about what has happened.

Brian Lehrer: It was a weird moment to do the census last year, April of 2020, and the subsequent months, because so many people had left temporarily, and I know they were supposed to put their permanent addresses on the census forms, but I'm sure that didn't always happen, so I wonder if there's going to be an accuracy of the census issue when it comes back. Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Joe Salvo. I'll let you give that answer in a second. Listeners, who has a New York City demographics question for the outgoing chief demographer of the New York City Department of City Planning, Joe Salvo?

Who's been in the job for nearly 30 years and he has just officially retired. Though as he told us at the beginning of the segment, he expects to continue working in the field but he's not going to be the New York City chief demographer anymore, employed by the city government. Who has a long-term or other New York City demographics question for him? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet your question @BrianLehrer. You wanted to say something about the accuracy of the census?

Joe Salvo: Yes. When I mentioned earlier to keep it a bit in quotes is, the American Statistical Association has an effort, ongoing, where several people are studying behind the firewall, so to speak, studying the decennial census to answer the question you've asked, which is, what is the quality of the 2020 census? How did the Census Bureau enumerate over 99% of the city's population, of the nation's population? I feel privileged. I'm one of three researchers working with the Census Bureau at the Census Bureau, in effect, looking at the quality of the enumeration, and there'll be reports out in June, and then another one in the fall to answer your question.

Brian Lehrer: Question from a listener via Twitter. The question goes, "In contrast with foreign born, it would be great to hear Mr. Salvo comment on intra US inflows, outflows, that is people who moved to the city from Wisconsin or Syracuse."

Joe Salvo: One of the amazing things is, at the beginning of the last decade, after the Great Recession, a lot of housing that was postponed in terms of its construction, got built. Then in 2011, '12, '13, '14, the city experienced the surge in population. We were adding 70,000 or 80,000 people a year. The reason for that was largely because of people coming in from the rest of the country, but historically, we actually export more people than we take in in our exchanges with the nation. That we just export more people than we take in and we make it up through births and we make it up through international migration, or that is immigration.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Saul in White Plains. You're on WNYC with Joe salvo. Hi, Saul.

Saul: Hi. Thanks, Brian. Mr. Salvo, I wish you the best for the next phase of your career. I've spent my whole career working with the Chinese-American community in the city and I've often seen it noted that New York is the largest Chinese city outside of Asia. I have two questions for you. One, is that true? Two, are there other such designations related to the other key ethnic and immigrant groups in the city? Thank you.

Joe Salvo: Wow. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we are among the largest because the overseas Chinese population in a number of places throughout the world is actually very large. Quick anecdote, I was once asked the question about San Francisco and then I proceeded to tell the people out west that actually our Asian population, now total Asian population, is much larger than the city of San Francisco, and our Chinese population certainly is pretty close to being as large as the entire city of San Francisco. We have very large numbers, but I would say among the most I wouldn't, and I'm going out on a limb with that because I cannot think about all the places where we have overseas Chinese throughout the world.

Brian Lehrer: How about on his question about other immigrant groups? I think a lot of people don't know, a lot of New Yorkers would have a hard time saying what the number one immigrant-sending country has been, number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but I believe since the immigration laws became looser way back in 1965, that the number one immigrant group to New York City is people from the Dominican Republic. Is that true?

Joe Salvo: Dominican immigration certainly as of 1980 or so, the Dominican population surged, and it has remained certainly within the top three or four, but the Dominican Republic and China vie with each other for that top spot. In terms of consistency, the Chinese population has certainly been consistent over time in terms of the numbers, but certainly, the Dominican population too has been very large. Remember, we get a large number of people from the non-Hispanic Caribbean, for example, from Jamaica. Our immigration from Mexico was big, not nearly as big though as it might be to the southwest or to California. When you look at the contours of our immigration, you see the non-Hispanic and Hispanic Caribbean usually very large as well as the Chinese population being very consistent over time.

Brian Lehrer: In the top five, if people from China, people from the Dominican are around the top, what other groups would be in the top five immigrant groups let's say in your 30 years?

Joe Salvo: Spanning over the period of time now, I'm thinking about this. Certainly, Jamaica would favor in, Guyana. What makes Guyana really special is we have the largest concentration in the country of people from Guyana, both of Asian and African ancestry in the city. Then you have Ecuador and Colombia. Ecuador surging more recently, but the newest group is Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi have come to New York in very large numbers and continue to come to New York.

Rounding out the top, Poland has always factored in to be pretty substantial. India, but India is unusual because most of the Indian immigrants go outside of the city, but into the surrounding region. India would factor in like I said, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica, as well as the Dominican Republic, and China, and now Bangladesh is a top five source of immigrants to New York.

Brian Lehrer: Bill in Montclair, you're on WNYC with New York's outgoing chief demographer Joe Salvo. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Oh, this is terrific. I should tell you, Brian, that Mr. Salvo taught demography at Hunter College over a decade ago, and I was on the full-time faculty there in the Department of Urban Planning. I can say with a little bit of authority, he's not only New York City's top demographers, he's one of the top demographers in the US. He was also a great teacher. Now, Mr. Salvo, and I'm going to call you Joe because we did meet several times. I always had my students read New York City's population projections first for 2030 and then for 2040. Do you think the city is still on track to reach 9 million people by 2040?

Joe Salvo: I think it's possible. I think that our original pop-- Because everything happens in cycles. We are now in a bit of a death cycle, the number that we are going to see in the census will likely be lower than the number we originally projected for 2020, which was 8.5 million. It's likely to be a bit lower than that. Hopefully not too much lower than our projection, but right now, we are still saying that the city could certainly, by 2040-- Because again, there'll be an upward movement, again, immigration will come back.

We are a magnet for immigrants. Thank God we are because that is what makes us a dynamic place. 400 years of history is all embedded with immigration. The city will come back again and I'm optimistic that that's going to happen, and we'll see a surge and people from the rest of the country, too. We've had periods like in the early part of last decade, where people from the rest of the country will come here. Understand, nobody stands still in this city. There's a cycling of people that occurs over time, and it generates the energy for business and the jobs that people come here for because New York City has a pretty diverse economy.

I will leave that to the economists to explain, but it is very, very diverse. Because of that, we tend to attract people throughout the economic spectrum which is healthy, and because we need people at all levels to come here. The way I like to think about it, I like to think about it the way you think about CUNY. One of the reasons why I was proud to be there was because CUNY is an incubator for a lot of the upward mobility and if you look at the cross-section of students from all over the world, it's amazing.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more question in for you from a caller. Susan in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Susan, real quick.

Susan: Hi, I'm an immigrant too. I was wondering what you think about the housing costs being a major contributing factor for the lack of increase in immigrants residents? Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. One of the most New Yorky questions that anybody could ask, right?

Joe Salvo: Yes. It's a very legitimate, good question because frankly, housing costs are very high. There are efforts to try to deal with that, but I can tell you that when you study immigrants and you study immigrant households, you find multiple workers, all in an effort to either perhaps own a unit or make the rent based on the fact that multiple people in the household work. There are all kinds of strategies that immigrants engage in. There are networks of people that provide access to information about apartments and housing units that we've observed over many years and they managed to do it.

That's amazing, especially in a city with costs like we're dealing with, and it's true. There are many parts of the city that immigrants live in but it is a struggle. Again, another illustration of the imbalance that we have right now, not only in the city, but nationally between those people who are lucky enough to have, and those people who do not have and are struggling to move up. That's what coming to New York's all about. My father came here in 1951 as an immigrant from Italy. Did not speak much English. It's the whole story. It's the same story we have today, except he was Italian. Now we're Dominican and we're Chinese and we're Bangladeshi.

Brian Lehrer: With the family story that leads us to today, we have to leave it. So fascinating as always with Joe Salvo, just retired chief demographer at the New York City Department of City Planning. Thank you so much for your work over the years, and for coming on the show over the years, and as you launch your next chapter and chapters, as you said, you're going to continue in the demography world in some way, we hope you'll keep coming back and sharing your wisdom and observations.

Joe Salvo: Thank you so much, Brian. It's been a pleasure over the years and I hope we stay in touch. Thank you.

 

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