New York City is like this too, or, at least, I think it is. I'm American so not the best person to judge.
Can you expand on what living in Vienna felt like? I loved visiting there and didn't feel unwelcome at all, but of course being a long stay resident exposes you to different experiences than just being a tourist.
It took a while to feel unwelcome in Vienna, and it was really a pileup of small things that didn't sit right with me, many of which on their own would be easily dismissable. It may also be my particular heritage that made it more difficult.
The primary annoyance was my Jewish heritage. I'm completely secular, it's not a big part of my identity and something I rarely mention, but it's also not something I conceal. It would only take a drink or two at some social event for people to decide to unburden themselves in one way or another. I would have to listen to people apologizing for their racist/backwards countrymen, I would have to let people try to set the record straight about how Austria is misunderstood and actually Hitler's first victim, and I would have to watch people's expressions grow pained and conversations go dead when I honestly answered questions about my heritage. Eventually I learned that it's easier for everyone if I stopped mentioning it, and eventually I grew resentful that I had to hide it.
Generally, Austrian-ness played an uncomfortable role in social interactions. Older people, upon hearing my standard (Hochdeutsch) inflected German would react with hostility and tell me that their language is different (I had no intention of learning the Austrian dialect), and that Americans need to learn to distinguish Austrians from Germans. I found the constant "in Austria we say 'x' instead of 'y'" and "in Austria we always do this in 'x' way" corrections to be tiresome. Generally, I was reminded that I was a foreigner much more than I felt was justified, and gradually I came to understand why many expats in Vienna cluster together as opposed to integrating.
I concur, as an immigrant who lived in NYC for a couple of months, not once I felt like a foreigner. Some other cities in the US where I've absolutely never felt like a foreigner - Bay area, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver BC.
Surprisingly, I felt like a foreigner in London, which is the most culturally diverse city and also in Singapore.
It really depends on the setting though. Where I'm from, I'm one of the four people in my office with my ethnicity and the only one in my graduate program. I've got about 500 colleagues and in my city and 100 students in my graduate program, my ethnicity represents about 9% of the population, and on the whole the aggregate diversity is extremely high here.
In short, I represent 9% of the population but 0.8% of my office and 1% of my graduate program. At the same time I'm associated with all the other things my ethnicity is stereotypically known for, in which there is overrepresentation. (the usual issues linked with socioeconomic shittyness, like crime).
As such I frequently feel like the other, despite living in a very diverse city. It's like we put water and oil in a pot and say look there's multiple things in the pot. But is it a melting pot? To me, not nearly enough. It's still shocking to me how much segregation there actually is, we've kind of left the discussion of segregation behind us since there's no more segregation by law (inputs), but the outcomes are still very much there.
Can you expand on what living in Vienna felt like? I loved visiting there and didn't feel unwelcome at all, but of course being a long stay resident exposes you to different experiences than just being a tourist.