The population figures that give New York the No. 3 standing are a point of contention. Although Ecuadorians commonly claim to be 1 million strong in the tri-state area, four years ago the U.S. Census found only 176,567 in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Perhaps that means Ecuadorians are seeing quintuple or the census counted with its eyes closed, but in truth the answer lies somewhere between both extremes.

Although neither number is correct, the census figures fall much closer to the truth, said John Logan, a sociology professor at Brown University. Logan formerly headed the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the University at Albany, where he authored a study about the "New Latinos" - those coming from countries in Central and South America that have seen a recent surge in immigration relative to more established groups like Mexicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

As far as the basic count of the population goes, Logan found that the census did not do nearly as badly as some believe.

"Personally I think that the census, especially in 2000, did a very good job of finding people," Logan said in a recent phone interview. "And in the New York greater metropolitan area, with 17 million people, I think they actually found most of those people, and they've got a very good sense of what share of the population is immigrant, what share is Hispanic in national origin."

The problems emerged when the census tried to paint a clearer picture of how the country's Hispanic population breaks down among various groups - differentiating Dominicans from Mexicans, or Ecuadorians from Colombians, for instance.

In that respect the census fell dismally short, a fault widely attributed to the format of the questionnaire, which required people to write in their national origin by hand but did not provide any examples.

"They created confusion in the way that they asked the question about people's Hispanic background," Logan said. "A very, very large number of people gave an ambiguous answer that got coded as 'other Hispanic.'"

The Mumford Center used a combination of census data and other indicators to revise the census's group-by-group breakdown of Hispanic population, reaching results generally about 40 percent higher than the census estimates.

The center's revised statistics put the number of Ecuadorians in metropolitan New York City (the five boroughs plus Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties) at 159,309 compared to the 111,722 counted by the census. For the entire tri-state area, Mumford counted about 250,000 Ecuadorians, 40 percent higher than the census tally.

Thus the oft-quoted 1 million figure is still pretty far off - although such inflation is by no means unusual, Logan pointed out.

"This is a natural phenomenon and we see it with every group. It's not anything special to Ecuadorians," Logan said. To say 1 million "is a kind of a shorthand, not that there's actually a million, but there's a lot. They use a term that suggests that there's a lot and it needs to be paid attention to."