In just a decade, the number of Tibetan exiles in this country has increased more than tenfold. Another 2,000 Tibetan exiles are believed to live in Canada, Mr. Dharlo said. Nearly invisible in the city's expanding and ever more diverse immigrant population, many of the Tibetans who are now living here came on visitors' visas and stayed. And like the city's other illegal immigrants, they have had to find jobs on the bottom tiers of the economy. Many Tibetan women work as nannies.
Many men find jobs as store clerks or on construction sites.
Until the early 1990's, however, Tibetan exiles numbered in the few hundreds in North America, where they actively promoted their cause of freeing Tibet from Chinese rule. Then Congress presented the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans, with the opportunity to legally resettle 1,000 people in the United States. The offer caused consternation. But the Tibetan leadership eventually decided that the mythical melting pot was not what it might seem and that many immigrants, if they stay close together, succeed in preserving their language and, to some degree, their culture. In any case, they concluded, the political advantages outweighed the risks of assimilation.