Flushing, N.Y. : Where Mainland Chinese Immigrants Are Moving In

Walking around downtown Flushing feels like a stroll in a city in China — not the typical American Chinatown kind. The expected Cantonese is replaced by a variety of dialects in China that would make a mainland Chinese wonder if he or she’s back home.

It’s been a long road for a village that was first colonized in 1645 by the Dutch. Today, it’s “a truly international city” in the words of City Councilman Peter Koo.

The 1980 Census showed that Flushing’s population, which totaled 25,100, was about 68 percent white, while Asians comprised about 12 percent. By 2010, the demographic completely changed. Asians represent more than 66 percent of Flushing’s 32,086 people, while the white percentage has dropped to just over 20 percent.

Within the Asian ethnic group, mainland Chinese immigrants are the majority with more than 14,000 people, according to the most recent census in 2010. The second largest group are Koreans with fewer than 3,000 people.

Fangmeng Tian, a professor specializing in migration at Beijing Normal University, explained in an interview that there have been three recent migration waves from China to the U.S. One was in the 1980s with a trend to study overseas; one was in the 1990s when highly skilled migration was popular; and the most recent one is happening now with more middle- and upper-middle class Chinese heading overseas.

One route is the EB-5 visa, designed by the U.S. government to encourage foreign entrepreneurs to create jobs here, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. This program requires non-citizens to put at least $500,000 into a business in the U.S.

Data from the State Department show that the number of the EB-5 visas issued for people from Mainland China has increased dramatically. While only 772 EB-5 visas were issued to mainland Chinese in 2010, more than 2,000 were issued in 2011.

Yu Sun, head of network research at the Financial Times, said in an interview that many Chinese immigrants find Manhattan too expensive, so they turn to Flushing.

Sun said Flushing wasn’t historically considered as a “fancy and high-end community.” These immigrants are coming from a relatively comfortable life in China, so they don’t expect to downgrade when they come to the U.S. To satisfy the needs of these new middle-class residents, Flushing has had to transform with higher-end housing and more services.

Flushing isn’t the first place to experience such changes. According to a South China Morning Post report in 2013, Vancouver faced soaring property prices and emptied neighborhoods because so many wealthy mainland Chinese moved there.

The article, which quoted a report by Canada’s immigration department, said that the number of the Chinese in Vancouver, a city of 2.2 million people, were set to double to 800,000 by 2031 — about a quarter of the projected total population.

This mainland Chinese influx to Vancouver, according to a study done by Demographia, a St. Louis-based urban policy website, has made the city the second most expensive in the world, after Hong Kong.

As with Vancouver, Flushing can expect more transformation as long as the influx continues.

“For people [from mainland China], Flushing is nice and familiar,” Sun said. “When you come to the U.S., you always want to stay with the people from your own country first.”