New Jersey is one of the most ethnically heterogeneous states. As of 2000, 1,476,327 New Jerseyites (17.5% of the state's population) were of foreign birth. The leading countries of origin were Italy, 7.3%; Cuba, 6.5%; India, 5.4%; and Germany, 4.4%. As of 2001, New Jersey had the 3rd-highest percentage of foreign-born residents among the 50 states, surpassed only by California and New York.
Blacks first came to New Jersey as slaves in the 1600s; the state abolished slavery in 1804, one of the last of the northern states to do so. Today black people constitute the state's largest (13.6%) ethnic minority, 1,141,821 as of 2000. Newark elected its first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, in 1970, three years after the city was torn by racial disorders that killed 26 people and injured some 1,500 others.
The estimated Hispanic and Latino population in 2000 was 1,117,191 (up from 868,000 in 1996), or 13.3% of the total. The Puerto Rican population, which increased from 55,361 in 1960 to 366,788 in 2000, lived mostly in Newark, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Paterson, and Passaic. There were 77,337 Cubans in 2000, many of them in Union City and Elizabeth; their numbers were augmented by the migration of Cuban refugees in 1980. Smaller Spanish-speaking groups included Colombians and Dominicans.
The estimated number of Asians living in New Jersey in 2000 was 480,276, the 5th-largest total among the 50 states. Pacific Islanders numbered 273,000. The largest group of Asians reported was from India (169,180 in 2000, up from 54,039 in 1990); there were 85,245 Filipinos, 100,355 Chinese (more than double the 1990 figure of 47,068), 65,349 Koreans, and 14,672 Japanese.
The state's total Native American population, including Eskimos and Aleuts, numbered 19,492 in 2000. Among the state's Indians is a group claiming to be descended from Dutch settlers, black slaves, British and German soldiers, and Leni-Lenape and Tuscarora Indians; incorporated as the Ramapough Mountain Indians in 1978, they live in the Ramapo hills near Ringwood and Mahwah.