TIL: Almost 40 Percent of New Yorkers Are Immigrants | Today I Learned

So get this, there's more than 3.2 million people in New York City that were born outside of the United States. Oh, that makes New York City, by a wide margin, the city with the most foreign-born people of any other city in the world.

I'm Jar Thorp. I'm a National Geographic fellow, and I'm a data artist. What that means is that I try to take data and put it into a context that you might not expect. So that could mean turning it into a series of shapes or a series of colors or a series of different types of designs.

So this piece is called "We Were Strangers Once Too." What it is, is it's 33 metal poles that are inscribed with the immigration statistics for New York City. So what it represents is 3.2 million people in New York City that are foreign born. They were born outside of the United States. Every thousand of those people is represented by an inch of paint on these poles.

As you approach the front of the sculpture, we've positioned all the color blocks perfectly so that they form a heart. We wanted to put this right in the center of the city as a statement to say that the beating heart of this city are immigrants. And also to show the incredible diversity of the immigrant population in New York City. More than any other city in the world, this one is built by immigrants.

The original name for the city was New Amsterdam. It had "new" in the name, and it still has "new" in the name. So this city is nothing without immigrants. It's what we are as New Yorkers.