Van C. Tran, Professor of Sociology and International Migration Studies, and Philip Kasinitz, Presidential Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Sociologists are notoriously bad at prediction. Yet, if the current opinion polls are accurate, one can predict with a reasonable degree of certainty that when thousands of sociologists arrive in New York City next August for the ASA 2026 Annual Meeting, they will come to a city that has recently inaugurated its first South Asian and its first Muslim mayor—the thirty-three-year-old immigrant Zohran Mamdani. In the era of Trump, this is a remarkable development. It speaks to how rapidly the city has changed but also says much about the city’s history and traditions of accommodating differences that continue to shape its identity.
“Superdiversity,” a term coined by anthropologist Steven Vertovec to describe levels of diversity in contemporary world cities, seems particularly appropriate when describing today’s New York City. Superdiversity is characterized not only by ethnic diversity but also by a complex “diversification of diversity” as a consequence of global migration. In essence, superdiversity captures the multidimensionality of diversity, encompassing communities of many ethnic origins with a variety of languages, cultures, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, legal statuses, and migration histories. This “multiplication of significant variables” shapes “where, how and with whom people live,” resulting in a modern-day cosmopolitanism that increasingly characterizes global immigrant cities.
A Modern Mosaic of Cultures in NYC
New York City exemplifies superdiversity. In 2024, 3.1 million NYC residents—roughly 37 percent of the population—were born outside the United States. These immigrants hail from every corner of the globe, and as many as 800 languages are spoken in New York City, making it arguably the world’s most linguistically diverse city. Immigrant New Yorkers include communities from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, all enriching the city’s cultural tapestry. The top countries of origin for New York’s immigrants span the globe, including China, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, and the Philippines. Yet New York’s diversity isn’t just about ethnicity or nationality; it also includes legal status and nativity. Some New Yorkers are recent arrivals on work or student visas; others came as refugees fleeing conflicts, or as family members reuniting with loved ones. As in many U.S. cities, most Asian and Latino New Yorkers are either immigrants themselves or the U.S.-born children of immigrants (i.e., the immigrant second generation). Unlike most other “gateway” cities, a large portion of Black and White New Yorkers are also immigrants.
As a result, the “immigrant” versus “native” distinction does not map easily onto the racial categories. Numerous languages, faiths, and regional cultures can be found within any one broad “racial” category. Intra-racial diversity is becoming increasingly the norm, rather than the exception. New York’s Asian population comprises East Asians (Chinese and Koreans), South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Nepalese), and Southeast Asians (Filipinos and Vietnamese)—as well as a growing segment of Central Asians (Uzbeks and Kazakhs), including both Muslim and Jewish communities. The New York metropolitan area is home to the nation’s largest Black immigrant population (1.1 million in 2019), mainly from the Caribbean but increasingly from West Africa. While New York’s White population includes those with ethnic roots that go back generations, it also contains sizable communities of recent immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. Finally, the Latino/a community includes a diverse blend (Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and South Americans), which has further diversified with the most recent arrival of Venezuelans that constituted the city’s “migrant crisis.”
Even seemingly homogeneous ethnic groups are internally varied. One example is Manhattan’s Chinatown. While it might appear to be a single ethnic enclave, in reality, New York’s Chinese community is far from monolithic. Residents trace their roots to different regions of China (or other Chinese diasporas), speak different dialects, and maintain distinct cultural traditions. In fact, the Chinese names of streets in Chinatown reflect the home provinces of the people who settled there. Cantonese, Mandarin, Fujianese, and other dialects are all spoken in Chinatown, and social networks often form around village or regional origins. In any “ethnic” neighborhood, there are layers of diversity—exactly the kind of complexity Vertovec describes.
Superdiverse Neighborhoods: The World in Miniature
New York City’s superdiverse neighborhoods are certainly one of the city’s treasures, and many areas of the city are home to long-established concentrations of specific groups. Places such as Chinatown, Little Italy, El Barrio (also known as Spanish Harlem), and Little India in Jackson Heights have become tourist destinations, offering “authentic” ethnic experiences. But even these iconic enclaves are continually evolving and layered with multiple cultures. Moreover, New York boasts “polyethnic neighborhoods” where no single group dominates, and dozens of communities coexist.
Elmhurst, Queens, is one such neighborhood. Here you might find a Colombian bakery next to a Filipino sari-sari store, across the street from a West African market and a South Asian halal restaurant. Elmhurst and the adjacent Jackson Heights are home to residents from Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador), South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan), and the Himalayas (Tibet, Nepal), all within a few blocks of each other. Taking a short stroll on Roosevelt Avenue, it is common to hear Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Mandarin, and Arabic, lending the neighborhood its reputation as “the most diverse in the world,” with over a hundred languages spoken. The streets are lined with restaurants and shops catering to myriad cultures—Bangladeshi sweet shops, Tibetan momo vendors, Mexican taquerias, Colombian bakeries, and so on—inviting everyone to share in each other’s traditions.
Other boroughs offer their own multicultural tapestries. In Brooklyn, the Flatbush and Crown Heights areas form a vibrant “Little Caribbean,” home to large communities from Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad, as well as African American families. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown along 8th Avenue lies adjacent to a thriving Mexican and Central American corridor along 5th Avenue. Heading south to Brighton Beach, Cyrillic signs adorn the storefronts in “Little Odessa,” home to Russian, Ukrainian, and other former Soviet émigré populations. Even Staten Island has its pockets of diversity, such as “Little Sri Lanka” in Tompkinsville, and a significant Liberian community in Park Hill. In the Bronx, neighborhoods such as Soundview and Parkchester include large Dominican, Puerto Rican, African, and South Asian populations living side by side. And while the “Little Italy in the Bronx” along Arthur Avenue boasts of more authentic Italian groceries and restaurants than that other “Little Italy” in Manhattan, many of these establishments are staffed by Albanians—some of whom have taken Italian names in an ironic twist on the idea of assimilation—becoming American by becoming Italian.
These neighborhoods are not generally isolated enclaves, but vibrant communities. New York’s population density (by far the highest among large American cities) and unique dependence on mass transit mean that people from different backgrounds have little choice but to share public spaces—parks, subways, schools, and crowded commercial streets. Of course, they do not always get along with each other. Yet, they often can’t avoid learning bits of each other’s languages and customs. On a summer day in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, you might see families barbecuing Latin American style, playing South Asian cricket games, Chinese seniors practicing tai chi, and kids of all backgrounds playing soccer. This everyday cosmopolitan interaction makes the city a kind of “living atlas” of humanity, where one can experience a world of cultures just by riding the subway across a few neighborhoods.
Early Twentieth-Century Roots of Superdiversity
New York’s diversity is not a recent development. Between 1880 and 1920, approximately 1.5 million immigrants arrived in the city. By the 1900s, New York was already a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods. Jewish pushcart markets on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, Italian cafes and bakeries on Mulberry Street, German social clubs in “Kleindeutschland” (Little Germany) in the East Village, and Irish pubs further uptown cemented New York’s reputation as a city of immigrants. By 1910, 41 percent of New Yorkers were foreign-born, mostly coming from Southern and Eastern Europe in the preceding decades. An immigrant tenement on the Lower East Side might house families speaking Yiddish next door to Neapolitan Italians, Greeks across the hall, and Poles downstairs. One charming historical artifact, a poster in the New-York Tribune from 1907, showcases the city’s linguistic diversity by wishing readers “Merry Christmas” in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and, surprisingly, Yiddish (labelled as “Christian Hebrew”). Italian and Jewish immigrants were the largest groups at the time, and within these groups, significant intragroup diversity existed. Italian immigrants came from different regions (Sicily, Naples, Piedmont, etc.), spoke distinct dialects, and had varying customs. Jewish immigrants included those from parts of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, speaking Yiddish or other languages, and following diverse cultural and religious traditions, from ultra-orthodox and Hasidic to uncompromisingly secular socialists.
New York also had non-European immigrant communities. Chinatown in Manhattan had been established by the late 1800s, primarily by Cantonese-speaking Chinese immigrants (despite harsh exclusionary laws at the time), and it continued to grow in the early 1900s. There was also an early Syrian-Lebanese enclave (known as “Little Syria”) in Lower Manhattan and a small Japanese community uptown. African Americans from the U.S. South and Black immigrants from the Caribbean began moving to New York in significant numbers during this era, too, catalyzing the Harlem Renaissance by the 1920s. Puerto Ricans—who became U.S. citizens under the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917—started settling in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx in the early twentieth century. This broad mix of cultures and languages in the city led to the development of a tradition of incorporation of “difference” as seen in New York’s institutions, politics, and popular culture. This is not to imply that this cosmopolitanism has always been harmonious. Far from it. Ethnic competition and conflict have long been a hallmark of the city’s daily life. Yet, the fact that in a city this diverse, no one group could take its dominance for granted or assume its permanence created traditions of incorporation, cultural interchange, and hybridity.
Of course, there are significant differences between the diversity of the early twentieth century and the superdiversity of today. In 2020, one-third of New York’s immigrants came from Latin America, and one-quarter from Asia. Today’s immigrants (and their U.S.-born children) occupy all strata of society—from dishwashers, taxi drivers, and restaurant cooks to doctors, artists, and tech entrepreneurs—reflecting a broad socioeconomic diversity. Moreover, contemporary diversity encompasses factors such as legal status and transnational ties, aspects that did not figure into the old immigrant experience in the same way. Put differently, early twentieth-century New York sowed the seeds of a cosmopolitan city, but the diversity we see today is broader in origin, deeper in complexity, and continually evolving.
Embracing NYC’s Superdiverse Future
New York City’s superdiversity is not just a statistic, but a lived reality that shapes its character and identity. For researchers, New York City offers an extraordinary living laboratory to observe how people from vastly different backgrounds can form a cohesive, dynamic, if not always harmonious, community. One way to explore this is a new data visualization tool we developed, “Superdiversity in Metropolitan New York” (in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity), which enables users to explore present-day demographic complexity—from interactive maps of ethnic groups and immigration trends to charts that link diversity with socioeconomic outcomes and bivariate superdiversity maps. The tool examines the neighborhood scale of diversity by mapping social-demographic geographies and superdiversity “hot spots.”
Superdiversity in New York City means that an extraordinary variety of people and life experiences define the city, past and present. Superdiversity is not merely diversity in a basic sense, but a more complex, layered, and multidimensional form of diversity. What makes New York City special is how its millions of residents embrace their differences while forging a shared public and civic life. The city’s superdiverse neighborhoods—whether born of the 1910s or of the 2010s—stand as vibrant testimony that people from around the world can and do find a home and a sense of belonging here. The city’s open spirit extends an invitation to sociologists: walk our streets, discover our neighborhoods, and see how human diversity thrives in our great city.