New York City has a new immigrant population.

 

A Social Explorer analysis for The New York Times found tens of thousands of Venezuelans have settled in the nation’s largest city since the spring of 2022. Only about 15,200 people living in New York in 2021 claimed Venezuelan ancestry, including 12,250 natives of the South American country.

 

Since then, however, many of the 136,000 migrants who have landed in New York City are from Venezuela, according to city officials. The country has suffered from hyperinflation, rising crime, and disease in the worst economic crisis in its history.

 

The Times reported that 56,000 migrants have been placed in shelters in Manhattan. Another 41,000 are being housed in shelters in Queens.

 

Despite the troubles in their home country, the median household income for Venezuelans has surpassed other Hispanic cohorts. The analysis found Venezuelan households reported a median household income of $74,936, more than the $48,866 for all Hispanic households and the $70,411 for all New York City residents.

“The Venezuelan newcomers — like generations of immigrants before them — have increasingly come together in the city, bringing their food, culture and identity to corners where there was none before and, in the process, taking the first steps toward staking a claim to a neighborhood of their own,” the

newspaper reported.

 

Since 2017, the number of Venezuelan-born U.S. residents has climbed from 351,000 to almost 670,000, according to Census data. The Times noted that more than one-third of people living in Doral, Fla., are Venezuelan.

 

Although the Venezuelan population is widely distributed throughout New York City, more than one-third of the new residents have settled in Queens, which has become a magnet for immigrants over the last few decades.

 

“Every day we know that more migrants are coming to Queens,” said Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president and son of a Jamaican immigrant.