Indian American

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Indian American

Total population
1,501,782[1] - 2,765,815[2]
0.50% - 0.92% of the U.S. population (2007)
(includes Multiracial Indians)
Regions with significant populations
New Jersey · New York City · Los Angeles · San Francisco Bay Area · Chicago · Dallas · Houston · Philadelphia · Washington-Baltimore
Languages

American English · Hindi[3] · Gujarati[3] · Urdu[3] · other Indian languages

Religion

Hinduism · Sikhism · Christianity · Islam · Jainism · Buddhism · Zoroastrianism · Atheism · Agnosticism · others

Indian Americans are Americans who are of Indian ancestry. The U.S. Census Bureau popularized the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with "American Indian".

In North America the term Indian has an ambiguous meaning. Historically and currently, Indian was and is commonly used to indicate Native American. If a more specific term was or is needed, American Indian and East Indian were and are commonly used. American Indian is still the most common term, although Native American can be used to refer to the Indigenous peoples of North America. East Indian is still in common use. Currently South Asian is often used instead of East Indian. While some consider it derogatory, people of Indian origin use the term Desi to refer to the diasporic subculture of overseas Indians. The word "desi" means "of the country/homeland" in Hindi and is also used as "countryman" in the U.S..

A number of Indian Americans came to the U.S. via Indian communities in other countries such as Fiji, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, the United Kingdom (where over 2.7% of the population is Indian), Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, South Africa, Canada, Guyana, Mauritius and nations of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Singapore. Indian Americans are mostly Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian and Jain and are among the most highly educated in American demographics.[4]

Population

Numbers

According to the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Asian Indian population in the United States grew from almost 1,679,000 in 2000 to 2,570,000 in 2007: a growth rate of 53%, the highest for any Asian American community, and among the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States. Indian Americans are the third largest Asian American ethnic group, after Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans.[5][6][7]

Settlement

The U.S. states with the largest Indian American populations, in order, are California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Illinois.[8] There are also large Indian American populations in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and Ohio. The New York metropolitan area, consisting of New York City and adjacent areas within the state of New York as well as nearby areas within the states of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, is home to approximately 600,000 Indian Americans as of 2009, comprising by far the largest Indian American population of any metropolitan area in the United States. As of August 2009, Indian airline carriers Air India and Jet Airways as well as United States airline carrier Continental Airlines were all offering flights from the New York metropolitan area to and from India. At least seventeen Indian American enclaves characterized as a Little India have emerged in the New York metropolitan area.

Other metropolitan areas with large Indian American populations include San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington/Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta. The town of Edison, New Jersey (total population 100,499) is 17.5% Indian American – the highest percentage of any municipality in the United States.[9] But the mostly agrarian Imperial Valley, California near the Mexican border has a long history of Indian Americans (an estimated 21,000 live in Imperial County, California alone) since the first arrivals to the California desert in the early 1900s.^{[citation needed]} The first American Sikh temples were in the Sacramento (Marysville and Yuba City) and San Joaquin Valleys (Lodi and Stockton) to serve the early wave of Sikh Indian workers arrived there.^{[citation needed]} In contrast with East Asian Americans, who tend to be concentrated in California and other areas near the Pacific coast, Indian Americans are more evenly distributed throughout the United States.[10]

Statistics on Indians in the US

In the year 2006, of the entire total 1,266,264 legal immigrants to USA from all the countries, 58,072 were from India. Immigration from India is currently at its highest level in history. Between 2000 and 2006 421,006 Indian immigrants were admitted to the United States, up from 352,278 during the 1990-1999 period.[11] According to the US census, the overall growth rate for Indians from 1990 to 2000 was 105.87 per cent. The average growth rate for the whole of USA was only 7.6 per cent.

Indians comprise 16.4 percent of the Asian-American community. They are the third largest in the Asian American population. In 2000, of all the foreign born population in USA, Indians were 1.007 million. From 2000 onwards the growth rate and the per cent rate of Indians amongst all the immigrants has increased by over 100 percent. According to the US Census Bureau, between 1990 and 2000, the Indian population in the US grew 130% - 10 times the national average of 13%.

Today, Indian Americans are the third largest Asian American ethnic group following Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans.[5][6][7]

A joint Duke University - UC Berkeley study revealed that Indian immigrants have founded more engineering and technology companies from 1995 to 2005 than immigrants from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan combined.[12] A University of California, Berkeley, study reported that one-third of the engineers in Silicon Valley are of Indian descent, while 7% of valley hi-tech firms are led by Indian CEOs.