Dominican immigrants
Dominican immigrants are individuals who have moved from the Dominican Republic to the United States, a trend that surged notably in the latter part of the twentieth century. As one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in the U.S., Dominicans now rank as the fifth-largest Hispanic group, following Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Salvadorans. Their migration was influenced by a combination of push factors, such as political violence and economic hardship in their homeland, and pull factors, including U.S. foreign policy and the pursuit of better job opportunities.
The historical context of Dominican immigration includes significant U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic, which began in the early 1900s and included military occupations aimed at stabilizing the nation. Initial waves of immigration were primarily driven by political exiles, especially after the death of dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961. Over the decades, economic motivations have increasingly played a central role, with many Dominicans seeking to improve their living standards and support families back home through remittances.
By the 2020s, the Dominican immigrant population in the U.S. is characterized by a diverse workforce predominantly engaged in service, production, and transportation industries. Despite facing challenges such as lower median incomes compared to native-born citizens, many Dominican immigrants have established vibrant communities, contributing significantly to local economies through small businesses and their involvement in various labor sectors.
Dominican immigrants
SIGNIFICANCE: Although the West Indian island nation of the Dominican Republic had a close relationship with the United States through much of the twentieth century, significant Dominican immigration into the United States did not begin until the latter part of the century. Well into the twenty-first century, Dominicans had become one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations and ranked as the fifth-largest Hispanic group in the United States, after Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, and Salvadorians.
The first West Indian landfall of explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, the island of Santo Domingo was colonized by Spain. Later, the French took control of the western part of the island, which became the separate nation of Haiti. By enslaving Arawak, Taino, and African peoples, the Spanish and French produced valuable sugarcane, tobacco, indigo, cotton, and coffee crops on the island’s plantations. By the eighteenth century, the island was the most prosperous colony in the West Indies. Modern Dominicans trace their origins to colonial intermixtures of Native Amerindians, Africans, and European settlers.
U.S. Involvement in the Dominican Republic
During the early nineteenth century, Spanish Santo Domingo was almost constantly in upheaval. Between 1805 and 1844, it experienced two Haitian invasions, a popular revolt that led to independence, and a return to Spanish rule. After the country became fully independent in 1844 as the Dominican Republic, it was beset by an ongoing civil war that produced twenty different governments in as many years. Meanwhile, Americans became involved in the island nation when U.S. president Andrew Jackson sought a Caribbean naval base and, later, when President Ulysses S. Grant considered annexation. The island’s position along sea lanes essential to U.S. commerce, its proximity to the proposed Panama Canal, and its emergence as a profitable sugarcane exporter were among its strategic assets.
Burdened with foreign debt, the Dominican Republic yielded to the United States in 1905 when Theodore Roosevelt used a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine to appoint an American to run the Dominican customs office. By that time, U.S. investors controlled the Dominican sugar industry. Ostensibly concerned with the island’s debt to European creditors during World War I, the United States occupied the Dominican Republic from 1916 through 1930. During those years, the U.S. government oversaw the installation of a constitutional government and took control of the country’s finances, allowing U.S. banks and sugar investors to advance their local business interests. Four years after the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961, the United States again occupied the Dominican Republic in response to the overthrow of President Juan Bosch.
Push-Pull Factors
From 1910 through the 1940s, when U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic was strongest, a small number of Dominican immigrants entered the United States seeking employment. Most resided in New York City. Much like many other Caribbean migrants, Dominicans typically came to the United States as secondary migrants after first working in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, or elsewhere. Many Dominicans helped build the Panama Canal or did agriculture work in American-ruled Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century, but it is difficult to estimate how many of these people afterward entered the United States. It is, however, known that Harlem became home to thousands of West Indians from the Greater Antilles island group, of which the Dominican Republic is part, during the second decade of the century. Some New York City neighborhoods in Queens trace Dominican settlement to the 1920s.
Caribbean immigration was indirectly promoted with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted new immigration from Eastern Hemispheric but not Western Hemispheric nations. After 1930, the Dominican Republic’s oppressive Trujillo regime restricted Dominican emigration. Only 1,150 Dominicans immigrated to the United States between 1931 and 1940, and 5,627 arrived between 1941 and 1950—the first decades for which U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has data on Dominican immigration.
A larger wave of Dominican immigration began after 1950. During the 1950s, 9,987 Dominicans—mostly political exiles—entered the United States legally, an average of 990 per year. During the 1960s, the total was more than nine times greater when more than 93,000 immigrants arrived. After Trujillo’s 1961 assassination and a 1963 coup in which the democratically elected president, Juan Bosch, was deposed, immigration to the United States averaged 9,330 people per year.
Dominicans began to find entry into the United States more difficult in 1968 when the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 put a limit on the number of immigrants permitted from the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, Dominican immigration continued to grow every decade. Political violence and repressive governmental policies were push factors during the Trujillo years. During the 1960s, U.S. foreign policy became a pull factor. Fearing the spread of communism from nearby Cuba, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, helping to stabilize a pro-Western government and encouraging increased U.S. immigration in order to quell political differences on the island. Political factors motivated much of the Dominican immigration through the 1970s, but economic factors became paramount after 1980.
During the 1970s, the Dominican economy sharply declined. Urban residents desiring middle-class lifestyles were challenged by their homeland’s shortages of well-paying jobs and reliable transportation, water, and electrical services. Meanwhile, inflation and shortages placed even basic groceries out of reach of many Dominicans. From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, most Dominicans who came to the United States did so in the hope of finding decent work opportunities and living wages. Some did not intend to stay permanently, hoping instead to save enough money to return home to start new businesses or simply to live more comfortably. The peak year was 1994, when 51,221 Dominicans entered the United States. In 2014, the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics reported that 44,577 Dominican immigrants had obtained permanent resident status during the previous year. That same year, 23,775 Dominican immigrants became naturalized US citizens. These figures do not include undocumented Dominican immigrants, whose numbers may be several times greater than official counts of documented immigrants.
In the twenty-first century, the Dominican population in the United States exploded. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, there were 2.1 million Hispanics of Dominican origin living in the United States. That represented a 159 percent increase since 2000. That number rose to 2,393,718 in 2021. The Dominican foreign-born population in the United States stood at 543,000 in 2000 but reached 1.1 million in 2017, a 106 percent increase. In 2024, this figure stood at 1.3 million. Dominicans were the second largest population group from the Caribbean behind those of Cuban descent. In terms of Latino demographics, Dominicans totaled the fourth largest segment behind Mexico, El Salvador, and Cuba. The states with the largest Dominican populations include New York, New Jersey, and Florida.
In the mid-2020s, the large majority of Dominican immigrants were ages 18–64, which were their prime labor years. Immigrants tended to be older, with a median age of 46. Their labor force participation rate was 66 percent, which was close to the overall US average. Women formed a higher percentage of foreign-born (55 percent). Dominican foreign-born were primarily employed in the service, production, transportation, and material moving industries. The 2022 median income for Dominican immigrants was $50,500, which was significantly lower than American native-born citizens ($74,600) and the average of other immigrant groups ($75,500).
In the 2020s, Dominican travel to the United States mirrored the dangerous journey many such immigrant groups undertook to arrive at the US southern border. Migrants would first travel to countries such as Mexico and Guatemala and then begin an overland trek of over a thousand miles to the United States.
Unique Characteristics
A large portion of Dominican immigrants send part of their U.S. earnings to their families in the Dominican Republic. Their remittances have made an important contribution to the Dominican economy. Patricia Pessar’s analysis of a 1981 survey of Dominicans in New York City shows that both male and female Dominican immigrants have worked as semiskilled and unskilled laborers in the manufacturing sector. Many Dominican men worked in the service sector, sometimes as managers and proprietors of small businesses and as skilled craft and blue-collar workers. Many of the women worked as clerical or domestic workers.
Surveys of Dominican immigrants during the 1980s indicated that more than half of Dominican immigrants were female and either were married or were divorced heads of households. They also saw a high concentration of female Dominican garment workers. In New York City, a profusion of Dominican small businesses emerged during the 1980s and 1990s. These included grocery stores, beauty shops, travel agencies, and small manufacturing plants that did subcontracting work for larger manufacturers. As Dominicans have experienced greater economic success in the United States, many of those who once planned to return to their homeland have decided to remain in the United States, partly in order to be near their American-born children.
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