Percent Of Naturalized Citizens in Herkimer County By Year of Naturalization

Approximately 40% of the naturalized citizenry of Herkimer County were naturalized in the last 15 years. Click to enlarge the graphic.

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Our Changing Face of Immigration: A Regional Look at 100 Years of Foreign Born Populations

The role of international immigration for our area is something I have recently been posting about. Like the country as a whole, our communities have long been refuges for those seeking a change in their lives as they left their loved ones, their homes and their cultures to seek a new beginning in a foreign land.

The percentage of our regional population that was foreign born reached its peak in the early part of the 1900s. Around 1920 nearly 50,000 people who lived in Herkimer and Oneida Counties had been born in another country. From that decade through 1990, the area saw a continuing decline of foreign immigrants – in 1990 only around 10,000 people living here had been born abroad.  The percent of population that was foreign born went from nearly 20% in 1920 to less than 5% by 1990.

 

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European immigration had long fueled our area with new community members. From the turn of the last century through the first decade of this one, people emigrating from the “old Continent” to our region have made up the majority of those settling in Herkimer and Oneida Counties. In 1900 more than 31,000 residents were foreign born, and 90% of them came here from Europe.  In particular, the vast majority of foreign born Europeans living here in 1900 came from the northern and western countries of the continent: places like England, Ireland, France and Germany were typical “motherlands”.  Of note is that many immigrants in the area also called Italy, a part of Southern Europe, home.  

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This flow of people mainly from the Northern and Western European countries has changed in the last 100 years however. No longer are those regions contributing nearly what they once had. While Europe as a continent still is where more than 40% of our foreign born population comes from, it is no longer dominated by countries in the north and west; former residents of countries like Ukraine, Bosnia and Belarus now make up more than 70% of the Eastern Europeans that have recently migrated from that continent. So there has been both a decline in the number and percentage of Europeans immigrating to our region, as well as a change in what countries those Europeans are originating from as they have make their way to Herkimer and Oneida Counties.

If European immigration is only currently accounting for around 40% of our foreign born population, where is the rest coming from? In the past, the small percentage of non-European immigrants came from places like Canada; in the last decade, what we now see is considerable immigration from south of our border, as well as from the west, in Asia.

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In 2000 more than one in ten (12%) foreign born residents came from the Caribbean, Central America, or South America. By 2010, that percentage had climbed to around 18%. Even more noteworthy, one in five (20%) foreign born people in the region were from Asia according to the 2000 Census. In 2010, a full third (33%) of immigrants were of Asian heritage.  Combined then, more than half of the foreign born members of our communities are now from somewhere other than Europe – versus  100 years ago when 90% of international immigrants came from there.  

International migration in our region has changed considerably in the last 100 years then. We have gone from having a very Euro-centric foreign born immigrant population to one that is much more blended with Latin American, South American, Mexican and Asian cultures all competing to become the next versions of our region's proud Italian, Polish, German and other successful ethnic communities.

In-Migration Population and Poverty Estimates for NYS Counties

While the migration of people into Oneida and Herkimer Counties is far from a static process, there is data about the nature of some of those that come to our region based on the American Communities Survey.

Unfortunately not everyone who immigrates to our region arrives with a home, a family, or a job waiting for them. Sometimes those that arrive here are in desperate need of help.

Below is a table which shows the percent of people migrating into New York State counties* who are at or below the poverty line for each of five years (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). These include people migrating between NYS counties, people migration into New York from other states, and people coming here from other countries as well. Generally speaking, the average for most counties is about a quarter of all in-migration populations are people in poverty.

* = Only counties that have single year estimates from the ACS were included in this table.

Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees: Primary Immigration Data Through 2013

For over 200 years, Utica, New York, a city of 60,000 has attracted immigrants and refugees.  The immigrant communities that have settled in the city include Italian, Irish, German, Polish, and Arab populations.  In the past 30 years, Utica has been host to more than 13,000 refugees.

This phenomenon has been the subject of numerous national and international news articles and has provided Oneida County with the fourth highest concentration of refugees in the U.S. and the City of Utica with a refugee population of nearly 12%. Refugees have been resettled to the region by the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees  (MVRCR), one of the largest resettlement agencies in the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service network.

The MVRCR has become an important part of our region by promoting the well-being of culturally diverse individuals and families within our communities. They welcome refugees and immigrants, and provide individual and community-centered activities designed to create opportunity and facilitate understanding. They offer a combination of programs and services that help teach refugees practical life skills that: (a) enhance their ability to integrate into the community; (b) build individual and community capacity to integrate our new neighbors into the local Utica community; and (c) foster an atmosphere of understanding and tolerance through the engagement of individual clients, the refugee/immigrant community and the local community.
 
Since its inception, the Center has assisted refugees from more than 31 countries, including Bosnia, Cambodia, Czechoslovakia, Haiti, Hungary, Laos, Poland, Romania, the former Soviet Union, Vietnam, Sudan, Somalia Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Somalia, Burma and others. To see primary immigration data on all of the immigrant populations that have come to the region via the MVRCR through the first quarter of this year, click the table below.

 

 

 

 

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