Within the next several years, the man, Mr. Wang, was joined in New York by numerous relatives: cousins, uncles and aunts. Some came on family-related visas and green cards, others sneaked in, still others got asylum. There were marriages and children, the roots of the family tree pushing deeper into American soil. His extended family in the United States now numbers in the scores, many of them living in the Chinese enclaves of New York City.

“I can’t count how many there are,” said Mr. Wang, who now lives in Flushing, Queens, and tends a wok in a Chinese restaurant. He requested that his full name not be used because of his immigration history.

The migratory experience of the Wang family is part of a larger narrative that is transforming the city: the tremendous growth of the Chinese population over the past several decades. Now the second-largest foreign-born group in the city, the Chinese are on the verge of overtaking immigrants from the Dominican Republic for the top spot.

The evolution of the Chinese diaspora is one of the stories of New York explored in a new report by the City Planning Department that provides a detailed statistical analysis of the city’s ever-shifting immigrant population, charting where the most recent arrivals have come from, where they have settled, the jobs they have taken and their impact on the economy.

Called The Newest New Yorkers, the 235-page report is the fifth edition of a study first released in 1992. It is intended as a reference for policy makers, planners and service providers, its authors said, “to help them gain perspective on a population that continues to reshape the city.”

Now numbering about 3.1 million — an all-time high — the city’s immigrant population, which composes about 37 percent of the overall population, includes more people from more places on the planet than ever before, in large part the result of the passage of 1965 immigration legislation that allowed more immigrants from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa. In a city that once had a population of predominantly European origin, there is now no dominant racial, ethnic or nationality group.

“New York arguably boasts the most diverse population of any major city in the world because of the flow of immigrants from across the globe,” the report said.

This arrival of immigrants in the past four decades has also helped to bolster the city’s economy and usher in “an era of renewal and growth” following the economic slump in the 1970s that saw the loss of 10 percent of the general population, noted the report, which was written by Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division of the City Planning Department, and Arun Peter Lobo, the division’s deputy director.

Dominicans have been the largest immigrant group in the city since 1990 and currently number about 380,200 residents. But the Chinese, who have held the No. 2 spot for that period, are now close behind, with 350,200. While the Dominican population has grown about 3 percent in the past decade, the Chinese population has grown by 34 percent. China was also the single largest source of legally admitted immigrants in New York City from 2002 to 2011, said the report, which was largely based on Census Bureau data as well other federal and city administrative data.

“China seems to be surging,” Mr. Salvo said. The data, he added, “points to China ultimately becoming the largest source of immigrants to New York.”

Much of the Chinese immigration, the demographers found, is driven by asylum petitions. More than 40 percent of all Chinese immigrants who were legally admitted in New York between 2002 and 2011 received asylum.

Still, the rate of growth among the Chinese pales in comparison to the Mexicans. In the past decade, the Mexican population has surged by 52 percent, the largest spurt of any group, vaulting them over the Guyanese and the Jamaicans and moving them into third place among the largest foreign-born group in the city.

Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Russia rounded out the top 10 populations.