The people of Buenos Aires are known as porteños (people of the port), acknowledging the historical importance of the port in the development of the city and the nation. Suburbanites are called porteños and sometimes bonaerenses (the demonym of the Buenos Aires province).
According to the census, the city proper has a population of 2,776,138, while the Greater Buenos Aires conurbation has more than 12.4 million inhabitants (2001 census).
Most porteños have European origins, with Spanish and Italian descent being the most common, mainly from the Galician, Asturian, and Basque regions of Spain, and the Calabrian, Ligurian, Piedmont and Neapolitan regions of Italy.
Other European origins include German, Portuguese, Polish, Irish, French, Croatian and English.
In the 1990s, there was a small wave of immigration from Romania and Ukraine.
There is a small minority of an old criollo population, dating back to the Spanish colonial days. Criollo and Spanish-aboriginal (mestizo) population in the city has increased mostly as a result of migration, both from the provinces and from nearby countries such as Bolivia, Perú and Paraguay, since the second half of the 20th century.
Important Arab (mostly Syrian-Lebanese) and Armenian communities have been significant in commerce and civic life since the beginning of the 20th century.
Buenos Aires’s Jewish community, numbering around 250,000, is the largest Jewish community in Latin America. Most are of Eastern European Ashkenazi origin, with a significant minority of Sephardim, mostly Syrian Jews.
The first major East Asian community in Buenos Aires was the Japanese, most notably from Okinawa. Traditionally, Japanese-Argentines were noted as flower growers; in the city proper, there was a Japanese near-monopoly in dry cleaning. Later generations have branched into all fields of activity. Ever since the 1970s there has been an important influx of immigration from China and Korea.
