By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written July 2009
With the center of gravity of the global economy shifting towards Asia, Asian populations in the US have come under the media glare. How these relatively new immigrants have succeeded in the US despite their dis-anctly non-Caucasian looks, languages, foods, faiths, and ethos has been the topic in stories in Business Week, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Look at these 2008 numbers from US Census Bureau on the the median annual household incomes:
Asian: $66,000; Non-Hispanic Whites: $56,000; Blacks and Hispanics have median incomes around $35,000; Entire US: $50,000
Asians’ — including Indians’ — high incomes and net worth, the desirable ZIP codes of their homes, and their Spelling Bee performances are commented upon endlessly in the mainstream media. One common theme in these stories is Asians strong family identity and honor, respect for elders, thrift, and stress on education, all contributing to their material success.
Understandably, Indians, feel pretty glib about this favorable media glare, even though they subliminally know, but would want to attribute their success to their supposedly better genes and DNAs. So, among Indians, the working axiom is: If you are a desi, you ought to be well educated with a sigh-paying job; you ought to live in a desirable ZIP code. If you don’t, then something is wrong with you.
But the material success of Indians in the US is also due to their skewed demography. An overwhelming majority of Indians — the first immigrants in all their families — are cherry-picked by US for immigration for their education and skills that are in shortage here. These immigrants acquired these skills through their access to resources (wealth, connection, influence, their mostly middle-class background or better) and the highly subsidized education in India in the 1940s through the 1990s. What they acquired through these combination of favorable factors, they would like to attribute to their DNAs and brains.
The same US Census Bureau’s study also shows a disturbing feature of poverty among Asians that does not typically draw our attention.
The Bureau defines $22,000 annual household income as the threshold for poverty. On this basis, despite their high median family incomes, Asians also have relatively high percentage of their population living below the poverty threshold. Here are the poverty statistics:
Asians: 11.8%; Whites: 8.6%; Blacks and Hispanics each around 23%.
A disturbing trend is that the percentage of people in poverty in all demographic groups has increased between 2002 and 2008, the increase being sharpest among Asians. One main reason for the increase in poverty among Asians could be because of the professional immigrants sponsoring their less educated siblings. This is true in the case of Indians to a great extent.
Therefore, just because we don’t see our poor cousins in social desi gatherings, let us not assume that we don’t have too many poor among us. The less resourceful among Indians may not be interested in showing their faces in a gathering full of people who they perceive as successful
One in nine or ten among Asians — Indian-Americans are a big chunk of this group — lives in poverty in the US.
One needs to analyze this census data and understand the whys. END