Asian American education and income level chart

[Kamala's side hoe]

Interesting that they put Hmong in red (geographic East Asia) and Burmese in teal (Indian subcontinent), I would’ve put both in gold (ASEAN).

I’m assuming the big red circle is “Chinese, except Taiwanese”? There are significant income and educational disparities among (non-Taiwanese) Chinese Americans and to a lesser extent, Indian Americans.

[Kamala's side hoe]

In other news, Taiwanese should stop being pharmacists, and start being investment bankers in order to catch up with the much richer but slightly less educated Indians.

While its plausible that Indians are indeed richer, the figure is household income and it wouldnt surprise me if it was due to family issues. Indians have very low divorce rates even in the US, which leads to higher household income.

Also, I've seen other stats that Indians are one of the few immigrant groups that get poorer in the next generation. The question of course is whether this is because the first generation does so well that they can only go down (since they dont have the capital of rich whites), or its just a statistical quirk due to the second generation being younger.

There's no real Indian American analogue to the non-college educated, blue-collar/working-class "Chinatown Chinese" enclaves you see in big cities. I guess Punjabi Sikh truck drivers would be the closest socioeconomic equivalent, although I'm guessing the Bangladeshi (i.e. non-Indian) community of NYC is closer.

Honestly I think Indian immigration to the US is simply more thoroughly filtered for the H-1B demographic than any other Asian country.

Taiwanese Americans can be explained by Taiwan's Confucian cultural heritage (this might explain why so many Taiwanese politicians have postgraduate degrees), but I think it's also worth mentioning that historical Taiwanese/ROC immigration to the US was disproportionately from 1949 refugees and their children, who tended to have more intergenerational human/cultural capital than the Taiwanese population at large.

[Kamala's side hoe]

NYT this week had an article that included wealth of various Asian groups, and while it doesnt say exactly what I alluded to above, it does correlate with it: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/21/us/asians-census-us.html

Idk which is more surprising about the VietAm stats- how low the college grad rate is or how high the home ownership rate is.

Bangladeshi and Mongolian households seem noticeably more downscale on average than the Bangladeshi and Mongolian Americans I've met and know IRL.



Why heatcharger dislikes all my posts on AAD, in a nutshell. The bottom part probably isn't a very good proxy for how Vietnamese, Filipino, ethnic Chinese, and Indian Americans voted overall- but it accurately describes their relative partisanship to one another. (A bit surprised how Trumpy majority-Filipino precincts were, although maybe I shouldn't be after seeing the Hawaii precinct-level swing map from 2016?)

Among Korean households, those headed by a person born in the United States have a median income of $95,000, but ones headed by Koreans who are not citizens have a median income of just $54,000. The gap is even wider for those of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.

Didn't see this coming tbh. Looks like ethnic Chinese intergenerational mobility patterns are closer to Korean or Vietnamese than say Indians or Filipinos due to there not being as many H-1B visa type immigrants as I would've guessed?

[Kamala's side hoe]

It's interesting: most of the Republican Indian-Americans that I've encountered come from upper-class suburban families (I'm an example of one).  By contrast, the working-class Indian-Americans I know skew heavily Democratic.  

2020 may have changed that cause while this is anecdotel the working class family members I have were much more likely to vote Trump than the more upper middle class types even though they used to be much more solidly democratic

Nope, this was largely the case in 2020 (at least in my own social experiences) -- though I understand that this runs counter-intuitive to wholesale 2020 trends.  

As a whole, though, we're still a relatively Democratic-voting group.  I've always found this interesting considering the stereotype of cultural conservatism that surrounds us.  Hell, I still can't wear leggings-as-pants around my grandma haha.  

I will say that the (mostly age 18-35 and US-raised) Indian Americans on Atlas seem more right-wing than the ones I knew growing up and from college.

Indian Americans are definitely the most "white-adjacent" major Asian group. It makes total sense that they (would if they don't already) vote like Jewish Americans given the broad similarities on cultural values and class/occupational profile.

Indians are also the largest single Asian group in VA, so if there was a significant R swing among Asian American voters we should expect major R shifts in Indian-heavy areas, along with Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino-heavy areas in NoVA and maybe Hampton Roads + Richmond.

And oh you don't need to tell me that many of us Indoan-Americans are white-adjacent.  I'm in the midst of Dhanteras tonight, but I still love my Starbucks and Lululemon dammit!

Wasn't sure which PG&D or Trends thread to necro for this (spoiler: there are a ton of them), but I don't think income or educational attainment are very good metrics for determining which non-white social groups are the most "white-adjacent". If you apply that logic to white Americans, that's like saying NIMBY-ish Marin County retirees are whiter than Elliot County KY Obama-Trump voters lol.

IMO Indian Americans are more white-adjacent than the other big Asian American ancestry groups due to:

1) Literally looking more similar to Europeans than East/Southeast Asians do if you ignore skin tone. Also the Indians who immigrate to the US tend to be lighter-skinned and more white-passing than the general population.

2) Greater preexisting English proficiency compared to immigrants from other Asian countries with similar education attainment, due to English serving as a lingua franca in post-colonial India.

There are also differences in business culture between India and the Confucianist Asian countries that have been used to explain why foreign-born and 2nd+ gen Indian Americans are better represented in tech leadership and management than their Chinese American counterparts.

3) Earlier immigrant waves were more likely to be of cosmopolitan urban elites than more recent ones? (Not 100% sure about that, but I once listened to a podcast on Indian political demography that implied this)

4) Religion. Indian Americans are majority Hindu and have a large Christian minority. This distinguishes them from Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans (the link attributes India’s relative individualism compared to Pakistan and Bangladesh to its Hindu cultural heritage, which makes it more similar to Western Europe and less similar to the rest of rice-growing Asia in that regard), who are probably more socially other-ized for being Muslim than Indian Americans are for being Hindu.

In my experience, Christian Indian Americans are much more likely to date/marry White than their Hindu counterparts. I also feel like 2nd gen Indian Americans in my neck of the woods are slightly more likely to do so than their East/Southeast Asian counterparts- although this may be due to parental socioeconomic status and educational attainment?

I might be biased because I'm on the West Coast, and East/Southeast outnumber South here by a lot outside of more upscale ethnoburbs and tech hubs. So some of my perception of group differences can probably be explained by average educational attainment and occupational clustering.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Most of these Filipinos were in America for a quite long time. In fact after nearly 375 years of being colonized by the Spanish Empire America colonized Philippines and helped the pre war country have a US type of government. This is why CA/HI/NV have the more higher percentage of Fil Ams in America. Saint Malo was in fact the first Asian American settlement in the country.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/17/us/filipino-american-history-louisiana-climate/index.html

Most of today’s Filipino Americans (at least the ones I’ve met IRL) are post-1965 immigrants or the children of said immigrants. I know a lot of Filipinos were able to let their families immigrate to the US after serving in the Navy.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: "Opinion of educated Republicans?"

@Vosem (deleting wall of text)

Before you start going on too much about everyone's favorite model minorities of Asians, you better understand that that is EXTREMELY depending on which Asian American subset you are talking about. Some groups like Japanese Americans who've been here for in cases over a century and a half, and many of immigrated as engineer or other professional positions, non-shockingly enough do rather well. And yes there are many examples of Vietnamese who have done well, but they had a very strong social safety net within the community that helped finance purchases of small businesses, etc. Not to mention substantial support from the US government helping them to relocate and get established.

But then you have other subsets such as cambodians and Hmong who have every bit as much the problem of ghettoization, poverty, gang affiliation among youth, Etc as African Americans or Native Americans. Hell, even in New York City the long established Chinese community has among the highest unemployment rate of any ethnic group in the city. And no, just because some of them are paid off under the table in Chinatown doesn't make any different from Hispanics and indeed many white ethnics immigrants like the Russians and the polish who are similarly so paid.

Again, please go right ahead patting yourself on the back for being so smart to figure out that racism's effect on the economy is a combination of negligible and ancient history, and is really just used by progressives to Gin up minority votes. Lord knows blacks and other minorities can't figure out on their own that they're being screwed by the economy over racism.

As a Asian Vietnamese American, I will stay silent on this. I have a lot of opinions on this, but for the sake of this thread....

The only thing I will add is I'm not sure if the Chinese diaspora in NYC actually has the highest poverty rate among all ethnic groups. As far as I know, Asians in NYC have a higher poverty rate than any other racial group; I have no reason to believe the relative rates of White, Black, Latino, and Asian poverty have changed that much in the last 5-6 years.