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Standing sentinel in New York Bay is the Statue of Liberty , which many consider the symbol of New York if not of the United States itself ( see Liberty, Statue of). The placement of this monument is only fitting, for the first stop of most immigrants to the United States was at Ellis Island, not far from the statue's island pedestal. It has been estimated that some 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1898 to 1954 and that perhaps half of the United States' population can be traced to these "huddled masses" that crowded through the island's cavernous Registry Hall .

As late as 1980 approximately one of every four New Yorkers was born outside the United States down from one out of three in 1920. New York City has the largest Jewish community in the world. The Jewish population of New York and its surroundings constitutes about a third of the United States Jewish population, and it surpasses by half that of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem combined. New York also has been ranked at various times as the world's largest Italian city outside Italy, the third largest Irish city , and the second largest Greek city .

Historically the migration to New York first consisted of the English, Scots, Germans, and Scandinavians, followed by the Irish, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Chinese. Since 1924 population growth has come from blacks moving from the South and from Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics . From 1965 to 1980 immigration from Ireland to New York amounted to 5,000 people, while in the same period more than 100,000 arrived from the Dominican Republic. The changing pattern of migration, coupled with increasing rates of middle-class departure to the suburbs, resulted in a substantial shift in the city's population. By 1980 New York City had become 25 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic. The Puerto Rican population alone, which was less than 1,000 in 1910, was nearly 900,000.

From 1970 to 1980, while blacks and Hispanics were increasing in number, New York City's overall population declined by more than 800,000 people. The number leaving more than doubled those who left the city during the 1960s. This decline, which paralleled that of other cities in the Northeast, was attributed to several factors. One prominent factor was crime, as crime rates rose to alarming levels and dramatic incidents came to symbolize the sometimes precarious existence of the middle-class New Yorker .

New York's shortage of decent, affordable housing also contributed to the exodus. A city of renters rather than homeowners, New York has the lowest rate of owner-occupied housing in the United States and the second lowest in the world. The rental cost of New York apartments , which averaged 617 dollars per month in 1982 (higher in Manhattan), is among the world's highest, and availability is often limited. The city's complicated rent control laws keep some New York apartments at below-market rents, but these are handed down within families as heirlooms. The result is that many of the middle class who might prefer to live in the city are unable to do so.

The New York left behind is a city polarized inhabited increasingly by the very rich and the very poor. It was estimated in a 1982 survey that 58 of the United States' 400 richest individuals lived in New York City almost three times the number who lived in Houston, New York's nearest competitor.

The rich live for the most part in Manhattan, though there are pockets of affluence in the other boroughs. Manhattan offers its wealthy residents the best of almost every urban amenity from penthouses and theaters to the stretch limousines that became in the 1980s a calling card of the powerful. New York is one of the few United States cities in which the very rich still live downtown.

In stark contrast to this horn of plenty is the other New York City , in which 15 percent of all families live below the poverty level the highest such percentage in the United States. Overall the city reported in 1985 that about a quarter of its population lived in conditions of poverty. In 1984 nearly a million city residents received welfare benefits of some type.

With this poverty have come related problems. Illiteracy (with the school dropout rate reaching as high as 38 percent in the 1980s) and drug abuse (particularly the long-standing menace of heroin and the highly potent "crack" form of cocaine) keep many of the city's poorest residents from the few doors of opportunity that exist in the midst of such barriers as racism, declining industrial employment, and the lack of vocational training. At the very lowest level of poverty, the warm subway grates and building lobbies of New York are filled with homeless persons and families, a population whose number more than tripled in the 1980s. By 1986 the city housed in public shelters as many as 10,000 persons each winter night, with many more still on the streets.