The new New Yorkers

A new report shows that New York City's demographics are undergoing radical changes due to legal and illegal immigration:

One result is the striking emergence of Mexicans as the fifth largest immigrant group in the city. Their census numbers quadrupled to 122,550 in the decade since 1990, when they ranked 17th with 32,689. City demographers said the true growth was still higher, possibly to a total of 200,000, and not expected to slow. Births to the city's Mexican-born mothers - 6,408 in 2000 - are second only to births to foreign-born Dominicans, who remained the most numerous of the city's foreign-born groups at 369,000 residents, followed by the Chinese, the Jamaicans, and the Guyanese.

The report did not try to calculate rates of illegal immigration for Mexicans or any other group, though Mr. Salvo acknowledged that the large increase in the Mexican-born population could not be accounted for by recorded legal immigration. Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center who has studied the issue, said that nationally, 80 to 85 percent of all Mexican immigration since 1990 was undocumented, while among other immigrant groups, a great majority had entered legally.

"Any place that's getting a lot of new immigration from Mexico, virtually all of it is undocumented," Mr. Passel said, "and that certainly includes New York."

Still, the city is home to only 1 percent of Mexicans in the United States - compared with 54 percent of the nation's Dominican-born immigrants and 45 percent of its Bangladeshis, who are the city's fastest-growing group. Too few to count in 1980, Bangladeshis surged to 17th place from 42nd in the 1990's, mainly through diversity visas issued by lottery. They now place 10th in the number of births, with Pakistanis right behind them. One reason is that nearly 80 percent of Bangladeshi households are married-couple families, as are more than 6 in 10 Indian, Chinese, and Pakistani homes, compared with only 31 percent of native-born New Yorkers' households.