WORLD MIGRATION REPORT 2015 Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility
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• Definitions of foreign-born in cities vary. While in most cases, foreign-born refers to those born outside of the borders of the territorial residence, some countries like the Netherlands include second- and third-generation migrants in this category despite the fact that they are born in the country of settlement (Hagendoorn, Veenman and Vollebergh, eds., 2003). Some sources differentiate foreign-born in terms of their legal status, for instance, illegal, refugees, asylum-seekers (Çağlar, 2014); • Definitions of what constitutes “rural” and “urban” vary between countries and can affect perceptions of over- or under-urbanization as noted above; • The quality and content of data varies widely among countries thus limiting the ability to make comparisons across countries and cities.
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How the American Community Survey is used in New York, United States Detailed information on New York City’s population and housing attributes used to be obtained once a decade from the “long form” of the United States decennial census. The long form was eliminated after the 2000 census, and this information is now obtained annually from the American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS has a national sample of 3.54 million households and provides detailed social and economic information not only for the city, its boroughs, and community districts, but also for census tracts and block groups that comprise neighbourhoods. The ACS is a rich source of information on New York’s 3.1 million immigrants who account for 37 per cent of the city’s 8.4 million residents. Latin Americans comprise nearly one-third of the city’s immigrants, followed by immigrants from Asia (28%), the Caribbean (19%), Europe (16%), and Africa (4%). These immigrants play an important role in driving the demand for housing: close to one-half of all housing units occupied for the first time after 2000 had an immigrant householder. These facts are drawn from the New York City Department of City Planning’s Population Division’s 2013 report in the series, The Newest New Yorkers. The report uses ACS data, particularly the public use microdata sample, which allows for an in-depth analysis of various immigrant groups. Information about age, sex, household type, education, labour force, occupation and income characteristics of immigrant groups provides perspective on where each immigrant group fits along the city’s social, demographic, and economic spectrums. A major finding of the report was that the elderly population is now disproportionately comprised of immigrants. While immigrants primarily arrive in the young working ages, earlier cohorts have now aged and, for the first time, the city has an elderly population with a growing immigrant component with origins in Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. This context is extremely useful to those responsible for developing policies, planning programmes, or targeting services to the elderly. Nearly one-half of New York City’s foreign-born population has limited English proficiency (LEP) and this can be an impediment to interactions with government agencies. An executive order, signed by the mayor in 2008, requires every city agency that has direct interaction with New Yorkers to provide language assistance in the top six languages (other than English) spoken by New Yorkers: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian and French Creole. These languages were identified, and are updated periodically, using the ACS. While this is a citywide list, it is important to note that languages spoken differ dramatically across