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New York just isn’t New York anymore – at least not in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Long strongholds for the American black, these Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods have become fertile ground for immigrant families to take root and pursue the American dream. On each block, new faces are appearing outside to get the morning mail, and the faces of the original American-born blacks, it seems, are steadily disappearing.

The catch? Those new faces are black, too.

To some, New York City’s West Indians appear as black as the rest of the U.S. Census-designated population of “African-Americans” in the city. But to others, including many residents of New York’s black meccas, West Indians are really “ethnic blacks.” They share a skin color with their neighbors, but hold vastly different cultural traditions and customs, much like the Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews before them.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines black or African American as “a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa,” and includes people who identify as Afro-American, Kenyan, Nigerian, and Haitian.

Yet an unprecedented struggle faces immigrants from the West Indies living in Bed-Stuy and Harlem: As black immigrants, they must combat not only racism and immigration prejudice from other ethnic groups, but from the native-born African-Americans that Bed-Stuy and Harlem are known for, said Carolina Bank Muñoz, an assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.

“This is the first immigrant group where being an immigrant is an asset over being American,” Muñoz said. “It’s just trickier, because of how skin color is associated.”

“When you lose your accent [in the U.S.], you basically just become black, and face all of the stigma associated with it.”

West Indians have been arriving on American shores since the turn of the 20th century, but their numbers have grown considerably since 1965, when immigration laws were eased for people from the Caribbean.

During the peak years of their first migration – from 1913 to 1924 – the majority of those bound for New York City settled in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In fact, almost a quarter of black Harlem was of Caribbean origin by 1930, according to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

As recently as 2003, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 24,219 of Manhattan’s total population of more than 1.5 million people identify as having West Indian ancestry. In Brooklyn, the bureau estimates that 248,190 people – the largest of any reported ancestral group in the borough – of a population of more than 2.4 million identify as having West Indian ancestry, according to the bureau’s 2003 American Community Survey.

Since the tightening of visa regulations in the late 1980s, however, West Indians have faced increasing odds to enter the U.S., particularly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Still, Muñoz said West Indians are highly sought after for labor once they arrive. Employers often prefer immigrants to native-born blacks, she said.

“There’s definitely a lot of resentment. I see it in my students,” Muñoz said. “I see a lot of tension between the two groups, in part because there’s a fundamental lack of understanding between them.

“One group comes to the U.S., is working really hard, and says, ‘See, I’m making it, I’m achieving the American dream, what the hell’s wrong with you? You’re just lazy, you have your citizenship.’ But that group is saying, ‘There’s a legacy of Jim Crow laws, slavery, and legally-institutionalized racism into the Sixties. That inequality is supposed to go away? That’s just not the case, that’s not how these things work.’ ”

– with additional reporting by Lauren R. Harrison