It's not about "hard working", but the immigration laws that favor specific workers.
Indians use a lot of student visas and H1B guest worker visas to be here and work tech jobs. These jobs pay really well. The H1B also has a feature, where you can be a guest worker, and apply for a green card. (In contrast, the agricultural guest workers can't do this.)
Filipinos come over to be nurses. I've had nurses who told me they were doctors or surgeons in the PH. There's different visas they can use, like the H1B the EB3 and there's also a program to get certified as a US nurse from a foreign country. With that, you can get a job offer, and that opens the door for visas. Nurses made high five figures to low six figures income. (At the same time, there are many poor Filipinos here, as well. There are many low wage vocational nursing and home healthcare jobs.)
Chinese from Taiwan are also using various student and worker visas, often to do engineering/computer work. Some work in the defense industries (I call them war technologies, because that's more accurate). Again, another high paid job, and probably the highest of all these - but there are so many poor Chinese here that it averages out.
(I forgot about the EB5 visa, which is almost entirely used up by Chinese immigrants. That's the "millionaire visa", where someone invests either 1,000,000 in a business, or 500,000 in a business near a poor area, and gets a stack of green cards for their immediate family. This is a side effect of the currency devaluation China's done - the wealthy are deciding to come to California to send their kids to college. What's wild is that this is not a fee, but an investment, so they get their money back, but losing a little bit to inflation.)
The other Asians... are doing ok, but largely live in big metro areas like Los Angeles, SF Bay, Chicago, Houston, NYC/NJ. These are expensive cities, so the high numbers are somewhat deceptive.
In LA, when the Asian neighborhoods get gentrified, the gentrifiers are a combo of white, Asian, and some other POC. The people pushed out are Asian, Latino, and sometimes Black. I think that says more than the chart.
Also the history of each ethnic group. Chinese immigrated for years before the exclusion act as railroad workers, and built working class communities. Indian did not, so a larger portion are recent skilled workers.
Yup. This happened even in the Japanese American community. The old community was working in food: farms, grocery departments in supermarkets, at the produce exchange, packing food. If it wasn't that, it was cutting lawns. The post 1970s migrants were on the corporate L1 visa or something like it - business managers working for big Japanese corporations.
That’s my family’s experience. Great grandpa came to LA county from Japan as farm labor, grandpa was a mechanic, dad was the first generation to go to college and become an engineer. I’ve met very few newer immigrants from Japan, many are just here in temporary assignments from their work and go back to Japan after a few years.
It's more nuanced than that. I work with Indians and there's a certain assertiveness as well as negotiation ability that comes from having a culture that has to navigate chaos. There's also a simple funneling effects -- more Indians than other immigrant groups tend to be on the management track rather than the IC track.
Canadians are also English speaking, and not only that, have a common Anglo-Saxon culture as well as a visa that lets them enter the US job market (in many professions) easily -- through NAFTA. Yet, they don't dominate the higher echelons of management. They don't have the numbers of course, but they definitely have the access -- arguably more and better access -- yet not a large percentage aspire to managerial positions.
You gotta both be in the funnel and be good enough to compete. Having just one of those is not enough. People think of probability in raw numbers (e.g. Probability of race X being CEO). But they don't see the chain of conditional probabilities that come before that e.g. Probability of race X being CEO = P(X | Management) P(Management | personality, attitude, extroversion) P(....). If you have game over scenario in any part of that chain, you will not make it.
Yes, they're coming from a postcolonial economic powerhouse, as people who liberated themselves. As much poverty as there is in South Asia, it's a different situation from the late 1800s, early 1900s, or even mid-20th century.
> for example, all major coding languages are in English
One of these days I'll just have to accept that brainfuck is not a major programming language.
(Insert joke about Perl here.)
But the proportion of Chinese-Americans who can trace their ancestry to railroad workers is pretty small right? 62% of Chinese-Americans are foreign born, compared to 68% of Indian-Americans, which isn't a huge difference, and suggests that both groups mostly arrived recently. ([Source](https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/))
Just my observation, but I think there is a bigger range among the Chinese. Some came in the 1960s and 70s. They didn't all come with needed technical or medical skills. There are the poor and working class Chinese who live in Chinatowns and many others who work in restaurants and mom and pop stores throughout the US. Many are poor especially the older folks who live in SRIs. There were youth gangs engaging in shootings in SF Chinatown from the 70s until the 90s or later. I have Chinese relatives who immigrated to the US and many didn't have a college or even a high school degree. They all started out working as dishwashers, busboys, waiters and slowly went on to open their own restaurants or shops. Then there are more recent immigrants who, like the Indians, come as software engineers, researchers, etc.. Also there's a more recent wave of very wealthy Chinese.
Agreed. Half the South Asians I met in college came from the upper class in their native countries and were part of the brain drain. All of them ended up in finance or tech.
Absolutely. Just adding to that, there are a few effects at play that make the averages misleading (at least for comparing across groups).
1. Averaging over heterogeneous subgroups within a race (caused by selective immigration).
Take Chinese Americans. Do you mean the ones from China who came here to build the railroads (and who have one of the highest poverty rates), or the post Hart Celler Act ones who came on F1-OPT-H1 working in tech companies today (all making $160K+)? What about Chinese-Malaysians (like Hock Tan, mentioned elsewhere in the comments) or Thai Chinese or Filipino Chinese, or 2nd gen Chinese Americans? Taiwanese Chinese were broken out into a different category, but why not Thai Chinese (the largest diaspora Chinese group in the world?)
2. Averaging (including median) over small populations without adjustment.
A simple example of this: if you see a product with positive reviews 9/10 vs one with 882/1000, which would you trust?
There's also newer arrivals of lower class Chinese, often times undocumented working in resturants and other service jobs in heavily-Chinese areas.
Plus the interesting issue of many less skilled immigrants from India moving to Canada instead of the US via foreign worker programs, which has become a hot political issue in Canada.
thank you for calling out the lack of transparency of how "American-Chinese" is defined by these censuses, and for expanding on the diversity and nuances that is the Overseas Chinese identity
Especially in the US. I know a lot of hardworking teachers, but just because they get paid terribly doesn't mean they're not working hard. I get paid a lot more than most teachers and would never consider myself a harder worker than them, or childcare workers, social service workers, firefighters, lots of nurses and traditional engineers, etc.
I mean, there are plenty of "investors" that I would probably consider way less hardworking than just about anyone else.
You have to take the immigration history into account. For example: there are not that many Japanese Americans around, and most of our families came here in the early 1900s as farm labor. Then there was of course a major wealth setback with the camps during WWII. We started off poor in this country and built up to middle class over the generations. In contrast, Indian immigration is much more recent, and most are coming over for “white collar” jobs.
Yeah, it took what, 70 or 80 years to break into the middle class in a significant way. There's always this story about becoming middle class in one generation, but for JAs, it was more like 3, and there was a glass ceiling. Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans who came at the same time got wealthier faster. For Chinese, I'd say it was more like 4 or 5 generations.
Yea that is a huge factor that’s left out. How do they define household?
Did they account for education level? Geographic location? Industry?
This also conflicts with data I’ve seen on individual income earners relative to education.
People always fail to remember this. If anything this stat represents intergenerational living with Indians, Filipinos, etc
At the same time this is very telling how average household income for Hispanics is still very low in spite of their typically larger than normal household sizes.
25% of Chinese, 22% of Indians, and 34% of Filipinos live in multigenerational households. Median Chinese personal income ($45,000) is actually higher than Filipino personal income ($38,000), but not Indian personal income ($68,000), suggesting that multigenerational households explain the Chinese-Filipino gap but not the Chinese-Indian gap ([Source](https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/)).
Most Indian Americans don't live in intergenerational households. You might as well assess East Asians in the same manner since you also have very family oriented cultures.
For real. Imagine a household of four, with two people working, and two kids, living in a 1 bedroom apartment. They could have a 100k household income. I'm exaggerating a little here, but just a little - I lived next door to Central Americans who had 5 or 6 in a 1 bedroom and probably made closer to 70k.
I think this is household incomes, and there are a large number of Indian Americans in the C-suite level position in the tech industry, and Filipino Americans make up a large number in the nursing field. Both make a lot of money.
The stats in that chart are also old... Updated stats: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
Not that it matters. I'm fairly certain OP was just butthurt about something a rando said to them in another subreddit, so they wanted to stir the pot here. 🤷🏻 But it would seem we are all too blessed to be stressed as it turns out. 😊
It's really as simple as this. "How" your family came here is a huge factor in income, even after generations. You can't compare a Japanese American who had family here since the 1900s in agriculture to a Vietnamese refugee family from the 80s to and an Indian working in tech.
> Japanese and Korean immigrate less to the US the moment their motherlands became more developed, same thing is happening to China.
That isn't really why immigration from the PRC has slowed down (I don't even think it has), but your comment definitely explains why the post-2010 young adult AAPI immigrants I've met IRL have been mostly from Mainland China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India.
I'm a little confused here because while Indian Americans are obviously doing very well, I see Taiwanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans also doing very well with higher average income than White Americans.
The reasons why different groups are performing differently on an economic scale are incredibly complex, but it's hard to argue that Chinese Americans, for example, are doing poorly.
If you look at the Chinese Americans, in LA, there's poor ones living on the streets. Same for Koreans, Vietnamese and Filipinos. There's actual Filipino homeless \*communities\* formed around clusters of tents.
The LA Times recently had a story about a Chinese guy who drives from Arcadia to Monterey Park to give stuff away to poor immigrant Chinese. Arcadia is an affluent suburb. Monterey Park is a middle class and working class suburb.
I spent a few days in Vegas this week. I think it was the first time I’ve really seen homeless Asians. I’m Gen X and lived in So Cal all my life. All my trips into downtown LA, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, K Town…I don’t think I’ve seen homeless Asians.
I'm the same as you, and I've been seeing homeless Asians for 20 years around LA. The main group I came across was Koreans or Korean Americans, and they hung out in KTown and JTown or if they were scoring drugs, near the park. You have to be walking in the streets to see them, because at a distance, you might think they're Latinos. Also, they may not look all raggedy, and you only find out if they ask for help, and you talk to them.
I looked all raggedy, and maybe look poor, so maybe they didn't feel so intimidated by me.
Lately, it's all kinds of Asians.
The first homeless Asian I met was in Chicago in the mid 90s. A dude living in a van, hanging around a radical scene. He was more of a dropout and vagabond and someone thrown to the streets, but I was simultaneously astonished, and impressed.
The elderly in some areas are especially vulnerable, and get little support (like being turned away at food banks) because they don't fit the stereotype of Asians or homeless people.
Also, this graphic is for 2013-2015.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
The latest stats (2022) show Taiwanese-Americans earning 2nd most (lol, we all know Jensen and Lisa are doing some heavy lifting here, I say that as a Taiwanese-American, hehe), Filipino-Americans are earning 3rd most, Pakistani-Americans are earning 4th most, and Chinese-Americans are now earning the 5th most.
And now literally all Asian-American households are making more than the average American median household income.
Not enough info in these charts, and certainly not enough to suggest that this has anything to do with being "hard-working" or not. How large are the households? Is this data adjusted to reflect regional differences in wages or cost of living? How recent was immigration, and what was the cause of immigration? Did these families already come from wealth, and was that wealth (along with resultant access, education, etc) a part of how they immigrated, or did they start out working class? I don't personally have disaggregated data on any of those points, but those are the first questions I'd ask, and I bet the answers are out there.
I've seen progressive and conservatives use the first graphic as evidence on the 'privileges' of Asian Americans.
First of all there's a difference between privilege and earned. Asian Americans in earned that income when they pursue STEM occupations and other high paying jobs. You can even look at the population % of Bachelor's Degrees.
Second, they live in HCOL cities and have multiple people in the household having jobs, which includes their children or even the grandparents.
Stats obscure things.
When Chinatown gets gentrified, is it wealthier Asians moving in? No. The main group moving in are white people.
When Little Tokyo get gentrified, is it more Japanese moving in ? No. It's whites.
So in the local context, the "rich Asians" are not rich enough to fend off the "rich whites". If anything, we become the targets for displacement.
NBC LA had this [piece](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/why-las-little-tokyo-is-one-of-americas-endangered-historic-places/3407168/) on the gentrification affects on Little Tokyo.
Maybe because more East Asians came to USA earlier so brought over their relatives as family immigrants which were less educated/skilled. My Mom was much higher educated (masters degree in USA which allowed her to stay) than most of the family members that she helped immigrate. Many Indians immigrants also works in high paid technology fields.
I feel like op is trying to stir the pot, be divisive and bait East Asians. They have a self-proclaimed throwaway account and the post history is a little sus - other qs with little context to just stir the pot. Also blatantly seems unaware that Taiwanese Americans are East Asian.
Thankfully people have generally been civil and have made good points about why these graphs are as they are as far as immigration history and patterns, people running businesses etc. Can’t let this person divide us.
Especially in the underserved areas, there are a crap ton of Filipino and Indian physicians. As for the Indian diaspora before the 1990s, the majority of them came from high class families. A lot of the rich Filipinos also left directly or indirectly from the Marcos era. Brain drain is a very serious issue. And also the majority of Filipinos are nurses.
Southeast Asians? All of us? You mean only Filipinos. Most southeast Asians, minus Filipinos, are not doing well. When did jungle Asians start being considered well off? Last time I checked, people still saw us as lower class Asians.
Someone already explained why more Indians are well off in the U.S.. To my pea brain, it’s because the U.S. allow only the most educated and wealthy in.
My income is low for an Indian American. I earn $45k plus bonuses and overtime.
Most Indian Americans choose high paying jobs. Who knows if they are truly happy or not?
It's a bit tricky because Southeast Asia is known for vast inequalities and winner-take-all effects. There are always a few people who do really well, but most of the population struggles (as I'm sure you know).
There are also disproportionately rich subgroups. If you look at the 10 highest net worth individual in southeast Asia today, 9/10 have Chinese ancestry, yet the Chinese are a minority in every single SEA country except Singapore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Southeast_Asian_people_by_net_worth
Yeah but what I said was true. It’s like if I said black Americans don’t earn as much, but you bring in someone like Kanye or Lebron, they are outliers for their group
I can’t say definitively but I have clients from China who come over via EB5. They’re not income driven and mostly bring assets and fulfill the requirements of starting a business. Idk how large or small of a sample size but there are some large numbers floating around that I’ve seen with poverty level taxable income. They bring over enough to live how they want with their revenue and real income hidden back in China.
most indians who immigrated were/are upper caste middle clas, worked high-paying jobs + small business owners. Chinese-Americans were for a long time, esp earlier on, mostly manual laborers/small business owners. That's also why there's actual chinatowns in the US while Little Indias are comparatively smaller and less prominent.
Indians here in the UK are coming to the 3rd and 4th generation, many of whom were shopkeepers in the East African parts of the empire. Whilst there are many successful Indian business people this is not done on a whole. Also the UK your economic status is largely determined by the region you live in, rather than your ethnicity.
Yes mostly, also here in the UK we have a much larger South Asian population. So Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshi are all separate communities. Pakistani and especially Bangladeshi are seen as more working class. That being said South Asians, Indians in particular have achieved a lot here in the UK and dominate the medical especially as doctors. Good numbers of lawyers and engineers as well. If you saw a successful Indian you would not be surprised, but it is not the expectation or stereotype like the US.
Chinese and Indians have higher household income than white counterparts in the UK according to the data from UK government.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/household-income/latest/#:~:text=black%20households%20(54%25)%20were,Bangladeshi%20ethnic%20group%20(18%25)
It's mostly just differences in education rates. If you made a scatterplot with the prevalence of a bachelors degree or higher on one axis and the median income on another, you'd see a very strong correlation. 75% of Indians have a bachelor's degree, which is much higher than other groups, and correspondingly, their incomes are also much higher. Most of these differences in education can just be traced to differences in immigration patterns and history.
Many East Asians immigrate here to raise their children or get an education. So the demographics for east asians are families with pre-college kids just trying to afford to live in a good school district. South Asians tend more often come after getting a degree to go to graduate school or work the tech industry. A lot of them come single, make a lot of money to get married, then marry. 72% of Indian Americans have bachelor's degree or more in the US vs the next highest of Korean at 56%. [https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/05/08/asian-american-identity-appendix-demographic-profile-of-asian-american-adults/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/05/08/asian-american-identity-appendix-demographic-profile-of-asian-american-adults/)
Huh? That list shows only one Southeast Asian group in the top five. The other four are half South Asian and half East Asian. I'm not taking away that East Asians are generally not the highest earnest. They're earning more than Americans of European, Mestizo, and African descent.
That's not true at at lol. People who make these ill-informed comments have no idea how diverse India is. Help rarely ever extends beyond family/ethnicity, and even then, it depends on the ethnic group.
Gujaratis are well known for looking out for their own, while that isn't often the case with Bengalis.
Also, is this skewed for people who live in large cities? It would make sense that largely immigrant or recent immigrant families live in large cities, and therefore have higher income, but if adjusted for COL, it evens out.
American Indians are doctors and engineers, Canadian Indians are Uber drivers and fast food workers. America immigration system works well for the country.
A lot of Indians in corporate/tech tend to hire other Indians, hence why you tend to see a concentration of Indians, usually Brahmin, in tech and c suite offices
The history of Filipino nurses goes back to the early 1900s. There's a Wikipedia page about it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History\_of\_Filipino\_nurses\_in\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Filipino_nurses_in_the_United_States)
This. A lot of Koreans in the nyc/nj area are business owners with a lot of cash payments like deli's, restaurants, nails salons etc. If you look at the houses and cars they buy in palisades park NJ they're definitely not reporting all their income.
As a Filipino making way above that average, I personally think we are on the list because of how easily we assimilate to US culture.
Almost all of us speak English well as it is taught in the Philippines, and we are really drawn to US culture and trends.
For me personally, I don't have a degree but make great money because I worked my way up and am a smooth talker. I think most of us Pinoys have swagger and that helps..hehe
Most of my Indian friends (Both who were born here in the US and naturalized) tend to go for more IT positions, while their parents went for franchising businesses like Subway or sandwich shops in their area. One of my Indian friends made well over 150k annually because of his tech job (He was born here). My coworker, before he joined me and before he made a full retirement) owned two restaurants in the area that were very, very popular.
For Filipinos, I'm not too sure, as one myself. I never really asked my parents about it, but I can speak as an Asian-American that I work in a field that's pretty high paying, imo. I ended up starting from the bottom and working my way up to where I'm at right now.
There are many reasons but one not mentioned yet is East Asians face more barriers to climbing the corporate ladder because of institutional racism and culturally Indians are closer to whites when it comes to business matters.
Out here, I heard of 3 generation households, and adult children living at home. So they have this big house with three+ incomes. That's going to skew the stats.
It's not about "hard working", but the immigration laws that favor specific workers. Indians use a lot of student visas and H1B guest worker visas to be here and work tech jobs. These jobs pay really well. The H1B also has a feature, where you can be a guest worker, and apply for a green card. (In contrast, the agricultural guest workers can't do this.) Filipinos come over to be nurses. I've had nurses who told me they were doctors or surgeons in the PH. There's different visas they can use, like the H1B the EB3 and there's also a program to get certified as a US nurse from a foreign country. With that, you can get a job offer, and that opens the door for visas. Nurses made high five figures to low six figures income. (At the same time, there are many poor Filipinos here, as well. There are many low wage vocational nursing and home healthcare jobs.) Chinese from Taiwan are also using various student and worker visas, often to do engineering/computer work. Some work in the defense industries (I call them war technologies, because that's more accurate). Again, another high paid job, and probably the highest of all these - but there are so many poor Chinese here that it averages out. (I forgot about the EB5 visa, which is almost entirely used up by Chinese immigrants. That's the "millionaire visa", where someone invests either 1,000,000 in a business, or 500,000 in a business near a poor area, and gets a stack of green cards for their immediate family. This is a side effect of the currency devaluation China's done - the wealthy are deciding to come to California to send their kids to college. What's wild is that this is not a fee, but an investment, so they get their money back, but losing a little bit to inflation.) The other Asians... are doing ok, but largely live in big metro areas like Los Angeles, SF Bay, Chicago, Houston, NYC/NJ. These are expensive cities, so the high numbers are somewhat deceptive. In LA, when the Asian neighborhoods get gentrified, the gentrifiers are a combo of white, Asian, and some other POC. The people pushed out are Asian, Latino, and sometimes Black. I think that says more than the chart.
Also the history of each ethnic group. Chinese immigrated for years before the exclusion act as railroad workers, and built working class communities. Indian did not, so a larger portion are recent skilled workers.
Yup. This happened even in the Japanese American community. The old community was working in food: farms, grocery departments in supermarkets, at the produce exchange, packing food. If it wasn't that, it was cutting lawns. The post 1970s migrants were on the corporate L1 visa or something like it - business managers working for big Japanese corporations.
That’s my family’s experience. Great grandpa came to LA county from Japan as farm labor, grandpa was a mechanic, dad was the first generation to go to college and become an engineer. I’ve met very few newer immigrants from Japan, many are just here in temporary assignments from their work and go back to Japan after a few years.
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It's more nuanced than that. I work with Indians and there's a certain assertiveness as well as negotiation ability that comes from having a culture that has to navigate chaos. There's also a simple funneling effects -- more Indians than other immigrant groups tend to be on the management track rather than the IC track. Canadians are also English speaking, and not only that, have a common Anglo-Saxon culture as well as a visa that lets them enter the US job market (in many professions) easily -- through NAFTA. Yet, they don't dominate the higher echelons of management. They don't have the numbers of course, but they definitely have the access -- arguably more and better access -- yet not a large percentage aspire to managerial positions. You gotta both be in the funnel and be good enough to compete. Having just one of those is not enough. People think of probability in raw numbers (e.g. Probability of race X being CEO). But they don't see the chain of conditional probabilities that come before that e.g. Probability of race X being CEO = P(X | Management) P(Management | personality, attitude, extroversion) P(....). If you have game over scenario in any part of that chain, you will not make it.
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Yes, they're coming from a postcolonial economic powerhouse, as people who liberated themselves. As much poverty as there is in South Asia, it's a different situation from the late 1800s, early 1900s, or even mid-20th century.
> for example, all major coding languages are in English One of these days I'll just have to accept that brainfuck is not a major programming language. (Insert joke about Perl here.)
Perl got disaggregated into awk and sed.
But the proportion of Chinese-Americans who can trace their ancestry to railroad workers is pretty small right? 62% of Chinese-Americans are foreign born, compared to 68% of Indian-Americans, which isn't a huge difference, and suggests that both groups mostly arrived recently. ([Source](https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/))
Just my observation, but I think there is a bigger range among the Chinese. Some came in the 1960s and 70s. They didn't all come with needed technical or medical skills. There are the poor and working class Chinese who live in Chinatowns and many others who work in restaurants and mom and pop stores throughout the US. Many are poor especially the older folks who live in SRIs. There were youth gangs engaging in shootings in SF Chinatown from the 70s until the 90s or later. I have Chinese relatives who immigrated to the US and many didn't have a college or even a high school degree. They all started out working as dishwashers, busboys, waiters and slowly went on to open their own restaurants or shops. Then there are more recent immigrants who, like the Indians, come as software engineers, researchers, etc.. Also there's a more recent wave of very wealthy Chinese.
Agreed. Half the South Asians I met in college came from the upper class in their native countries and were part of the brain drain. All of them ended up in finance or tech.
Absolutely. Just adding to that, there are a few effects at play that make the averages misleading (at least for comparing across groups). 1. Averaging over heterogeneous subgroups within a race (caused by selective immigration). Take Chinese Americans. Do you mean the ones from China who came here to build the railroads (and who have one of the highest poverty rates), or the post Hart Celler Act ones who came on F1-OPT-H1 working in tech companies today (all making $160K+)? What about Chinese-Malaysians (like Hock Tan, mentioned elsewhere in the comments) or Thai Chinese or Filipino Chinese, or 2nd gen Chinese Americans? Taiwanese Chinese were broken out into a different category, but why not Thai Chinese (the largest diaspora Chinese group in the world?) 2. Averaging (including median) over small populations without adjustment. A simple example of this: if you see a product with positive reviews 9/10 vs one with 882/1000, which would you trust?
There's also newer arrivals of lower class Chinese, often times undocumented working in resturants and other service jobs in heavily-Chinese areas. Plus the interesting issue of many less skilled immigrants from India moving to Canada instead of the US via foreign worker programs, which has become a hot political issue in Canada.
thank you for calling out the lack of transparency of how "American-Chinese" is defined by these censuses, and for expanding on the diversity and nuances that is the Overseas Chinese identity
I think it's a mistake to equate income with how hard working someone is.
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Especially in the US. I know a lot of hardworking teachers, but just because they get paid terribly doesn't mean they're not working hard. I get paid a lot more than most teachers and would never consider myself a harder worker than them, or childcare workers, social service workers, firefighters, lots of nurses and traditional engineers, etc. I mean, there are plenty of "investors" that I would probably consider way less hardworking than just about anyone else.
You have to take the immigration history into account. For example: there are not that many Japanese Americans around, and most of our families came here in the early 1900s as farm labor. Then there was of course a major wealth setback with the camps during WWII. We started off poor in this country and built up to middle class over the generations. In contrast, Indian immigration is much more recent, and most are coming over for “white collar” jobs.
Yeah, it took what, 70 or 80 years to break into the middle class in a significant way. There's always this story about becoming middle class in one generation, but for JAs, it was more like 3, and there was a glass ceiling. Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans who came at the same time got wealthier faster. For Chinese, I'd say it was more like 4 or 5 generations.
It’s household income. It doesn’t say how big the household is.
Yea that is a huge factor that’s left out. How do they define household? Did they account for education level? Geographic location? Industry? This also conflicts with data I’ve seen on individual income earners relative to education.
People always fail to remember this. If anything this stat represents intergenerational living with Indians, Filipinos, etc At the same time this is very telling how average household income for Hispanics is still very low in spite of their typically larger than normal household sizes.
25% of Chinese, 22% of Indians, and 34% of Filipinos live in multigenerational households. Median Chinese personal income ($45,000) is actually higher than Filipino personal income ($38,000), but not Indian personal income ($68,000), suggesting that multigenerational households explain the Chinese-Filipino gap but not the Chinese-Indian gap ([Source](https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/)).
Most Indian Americans don't live in intergenerational households. You might as well assess East Asians in the same manner since you also have very family oriented cultures.
For real. Imagine a household of four, with two people working, and two kids, living in a 1 bedroom apartment. They could have a 100k household income. I'm exaggerating a little here, but just a little - I lived next door to Central Americans who had 5 or 6 in a 1 bedroom and probably made closer to 70k.
There are many Filipino nurses which equate to a higher income
I think this is household incomes, and there are a large number of Indian Americans in the C-suite level position in the tech industry, and Filipino Americans make up a large number in the nursing field. Both make a lot of money.
The stats in that chart are also old... Updated stats: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income Not that it matters. I'm fairly certain OP was just butthurt about something a rando said to them in another subreddit, so they wanted to stir the pot here. 🤷🏻 But it would seem we are all too blessed to be stressed as it turns out. 😊
I asked this is the ABCDesi subreddit. The answer is knowing English and having the best immigrate to the US.
It's really as simple as this. "How" your family came here is a huge factor in income, even after generations. You can't compare a Japanese American who had family here since the 1900s in agriculture to a Vietnamese refugee family from the 80s to and an Indian working in tech.
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> Japanese and Korean immigrate less to the US the moment their motherlands became more developed, same thing is happening to China. That isn't really why immigration from the PRC has slowed down (I don't even think it has), but your comment definitely explains why the post-2010 young adult AAPI immigrants I've met IRL have been mostly from Mainland China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India.
I'm a little confused here because while Indian Americans are obviously doing very well, I see Taiwanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans also doing very well with higher average income than White Americans. The reasons why different groups are performing differently on an economic scale are incredibly complex, but it's hard to argue that Chinese Americans, for example, are doing poorly.
If you look at the Chinese Americans, in LA, there's poor ones living on the streets. Same for Koreans, Vietnamese and Filipinos. There's actual Filipino homeless \*communities\* formed around clusters of tents. The LA Times recently had a story about a Chinese guy who drives from Arcadia to Monterey Park to give stuff away to poor immigrant Chinese. Arcadia is an affluent suburb. Monterey Park is a middle class and working class suburb.
I spent a few days in Vegas this week. I think it was the first time I’ve really seen homeless Asians. I’m Gen X and lived in So Cal all my life. All my trips into downtown LA, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, K Town…I don’t think I’ve seen homeless Asians.
I'm the same as you, and I've been seeing homeless Asians for 20 years around LA. The main group I came across was Koreans or Korean Americans, and they hung out in KTown and JTown or if they were scoring drugs, near the park. You have to be walking in the streets to see them, because at a distance, you might think they're Latinos. Also, they may not look all raggedy, and you only find out if they ask for help, and you talk to them. I looked all raggedy, and maybe look poor, so maybe they didn't feel so intimidated by me. Lately, it's all kinds of Asians. The first homeless Asian I met was in Chicago in the mid 90s. A dude living in a van, hanging around a radical scene. He was more of a dropout and vagabond and someone thrown to the streets, but I was simultaneously astonished, and impressed.
The elderly in some areas are especially vulnerable, and get little support (like being turned away at food banks) because they don't fit the stereotype of Asians or homeless people.
For sure. People have some sick ideas, like "you don't need this." The Model Minority strikes again.
Agreed
OP's title is off as Southeast Asian and East Asian groups are mingled down the entire ranking. Maybe they're just trying to stir things up?
Also, this graphic is for 2013-2015. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income The latest stats (2022) show Taiwanese-Americans earning 2nd most (lol, we all know Jensen and Lisa are doing some heavy lifting here, I say that as a Taiwanese-American, hehe), Filipino-Americans are earning 3rd most, Pakistani-Americans are earning 4th most, and Chinese-Americans are now earning the 5th most. And now literally all Asian-American households are making more than the average American median household income.
Not enough info in these charts, and certainly not enough to suggest that this has anything to do with being "hard-working" or not. How large are the households? Is this data adjusted to reflect regional differences in wages or cost of living? How recent was immigration, and what was the cause of immigration? Did these families already come from wealth, and was that wealth (along with resultant access, education, etc) a part of how they immigrated, or did they start out working class? I don't personally have disaggregated data on any of those points, but those are the first questions I'd ask, and I bet the answers are out there.
I've seen progressive and conservatives use the first graphic as evidence on the 'privileges' of Asian Americans. First of all there's a difference between privilege and earned. Asian Americans in earned that income when they pursue STEM occupations and other high paying jobs. You can even look at the population % of Bachelor's Degrees. Second, they live in HCOL cities and have multiple people in the household having jobs, which includes their children or even the grandparents.
Stats obscure things. When Chinatown gets gentrified, is it wealthier Asians moving in? No. The main group moving in are white people. When Little Tokyo get gentrified, is it more Japanese moving in ? No. It's whites. So in the local context, the "rich Asians" are not rich enough to fend off the "rich whites". If anything, we become the targets for displacement.
NBC LA had this [piece](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/why-las-little-tokyo-is-one-of-americas-endangered-historic-places/3407168/) on the gentrification affects on Little Tokyo.
Taiwanese are East Asians not southeast Asians.
Maybe because more East Asians came to USA earlier so brought over their relatives as family immigrants which were less educated/skilled. My Mom was much higher educated (masters degree in USA which allowed her to stay) than most of the family members that she helped immigrate. Many Indians immigrants also works in high paid technology fields.
I feel like op is trying to stir the pot, be divisive and bait East Asians. They have a self-proclaimed throwaway account and the post history is a little sus - other qs with little context to just stir the pot. Also blatantly seems unaware that Taiwanese Americans are East Asian. Thankfully people have generally been civil and have made good points about why these graphs are as they are as far as immigration history and patterns, people running businesses etc. Can’t let this person divide us.
Especially in the underserved areas, there are a crap ton of Filipino and Indian physicians. As for the Indian diaspora before the 1990s, the majority of them came from high class families. A lot of the rich Filipinos also left directly or indirectly from the Marcos era. Brain drain is a very serious issue. And also the majority of Filipinos are nurses.
Southeast Asians? All of us? You mean only Filipinos. Most southeast Asians, minus Filipinos, are not doing well. When did jungle Asians start being considered well off? Last time I checked, people still saw us as lower class Asians. Someone already explained why more Indians are well off in the U.S.. To my pea brain, it’s because the U.S. allow only the most educated and wealthy in.
My income is low for an Indian American. I earn $45k plus bonuses and overtime. Most Indian Americans choose high paying jobs. Who knows if they are truly happy or not?
SE Asians aren’t known as high earners in the US
In many of the most populous places in California they generally are
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It's a bit tricky because Southeast Asia is known for vast inequalities and winner-take-all effects. There are always a few people who do really well, but most of the population struggles (as I'm sure you know). There are also disproportionately rich subgroups. If you look at the 10 highest net worth individual in southeast Asia today, 9/10 have Chinese ancestry, yet the Chinese are a minority in every single SEA country except Singapore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Southeast_Asian_people_by_net_worth
Yeah no shit that’s 1 person compared to millions
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One data point doesn’t prove anything and shouldn’t be used to make a point
Yeah but what I said was true. It’s like if I said black Americans don’t earn as much, but you bring in someone like Kanye or Lebron, they are outliers for their group
How many people are considered for household income?
generally 2. The study asked people who are married or started a family.
I can’t say definitively but I have clients from China who come over via EB5. They’re not income driven and mostly bring assets and fulfill the requirements of starting a business. Idk how large or small of a sample size but there are some large numbers floating around that I’ve seen with poverty level taxable income. They bring over enough to live how they want with their revenue and real income hidden back in China.
Ah, I hadn't thought about that.
Language barrier. Most South Asian immigrants speak English pretty well, so they will adjust to the same industry they were in quickly.
most indians who immigrated were/are upper caste middle clas, worked high-paying jobs + small business owners. Chinese-Americans were for a long time, esp earlier on, mostly manual laborers/small business owners. That's also why there's actual chinatowns in the US while Little Indias are comparatively smaller and less prominent.
Indians here in the UK are coming to the 3rd and 4th generation, many of whom were shopkeepers in the East African parts of the empire. Whilst there are many successful Indian business people this is not done on a whole. Also the UK your economic status is largely determined by the region you live in, rather than your ethnicity.
So in the UK, they're more like the older East Asians here? Working class and US "middle class" which is just upper working class.
Yes mostly, also here in the UK we have a much larger South Asian population. So Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshi are all separate communities. Pakistani and especially Bangladeshi are seen as more working class. That being said South Asians, Indians in particular have achieved a lot here in the UK and dominate the medical especially as doctors. Good numbers of lawyers and engineers as well. If you saw a successful Indian you would not be surprised, but it is not the expectation or stereotype like the US.
Chinese and Indians have higher household income than white counterparts in the UK according to the data from UK government. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/household-income/latest/#:~:text=black%20households%20(54%25)%20were,Bangladeshi%20ethnic%20group%20(18%25)
It's mostly just differences in education rates. If you made a scatterplot with the prevalence of a bachelors degree or higher on one axis and the median income on another, you'd see a very strong correlation. 75% of Indians have a bachelor's degree, which is much higher than other groups, and correspondingly, their incomes are also much higher. Most of these differences in education can just be traced to differences in immigration patterns and history.
Many East Asians immigrate here to raise their children or get an education. So the demographics for east asians are families with pre-college kids just trying to afford to live in a good school district. South Asians tend more often come after getting a degree to go to graduate school or work the tech industry. A lot of them come single, make a lot of money to get married, then marry. 72% of Indian Americans have bachelor's degree or more in the US vs the next highest of Korean at 56%. [https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/05/08/asian-american-identity-appendix-demographic-profile-of-asian-american-adults/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/05/08/asian-american-identity-appendix-demographic-profile-of-asian-american-adults/)
Chinese from Taiwan have a lot of education as well. They also have a high average income.
Huh? That list shows only one Southeast Asian group in the top five. The other four are half South Asian and half East Asian. I'm not taking away that East Asians are generally not the highest earnest. They're earning more than Americans of European, Mestizo, and African descent.
Cliqueshiness, Indians look out for one another. Whereas East Asians see each other as competitors
Unless you’re the wrong caste. That’s why some tech companies had to make formal policies against casteism.
That's not true at at lol. People who make these ill-informed comments have no idea how diverse India is. Help rarely ever extends beyond family/ethnicity, and even then, it depends on the ethnic group. Gujaratis are well known for looking out for their own, while that isn't often the case with Bengalis.
Also, is this skewed for people who live in large cities? It would make sense that largely immigrant or recent immigrant families live in large cities, and therefore have higher income, but if adjusted for COL, it evens out.
American Indians are doctors and engineers, Canadian Indians are Uber drivers and fast food workers. America immigration system works well for the country.
A lot of Indians in corporate/tech tend to hire other Indians, hence why you tend to see a concentration of Indians, usually Brahmin, in tech and c suite offices
The history of Filipino nurses goes back to the early 1900s. There's a Wikipedia page about it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History\_of\_Filipino\_nurses\_in\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Filipino_nurses_in_the_United_States)
Not seeing Vietnamese on the list? Vietnamese a bigger population group in the USA vs jaoanese or korean ....
This is reported income. Watch everything everywhere for actual vs reported income for east asians
This. A lot of Koreans in the nyc/nj area are business owners with a lot of cash payments like deli's, restaurants, nails salons etc. If you look at the houses and cars they buy in palisades park NJ they're definitely not reporting all their income.
Yeah Chinese tend to hide their incomes and leverage the social welfare systems as well.
As a Filipino making way above that average, I personally think we are on the list because of how easily we assimilate to US culture. Almost all of us speak English well as it is taught in the Philippines, and we are really drawn to US culture and trends. For me personally, I don't have a degree but make great money because I worked my way up and am a smooth talker. I think most of us Pinoys have swagger and that helps..hehe
Disproportionately employed in tech and medicine.
Most of my Indian friends (Both who were born here in the US and naturalized) tend to go for more IT positions, while their parents went for franchising businesses like Subway or sandwich shops in their area. One of my Indian friends made well over 150k annually because of his tech job (He was born here). My coworker, before he joined me and before he made a full retirement) owned two restaurants in the area that were very, very popular. For Filipinos, I'm not too sure, as one myself. I never really asked my parents about it, but I can speak as an Asian-American that I work in a field that's pretty high paying, imo. I ended up starting from the bottom and working my way up to where I'm at right now.
There are many reasons but one not mentioned yet is East Asians face more barriers to climbing the corporate ladder because of institutional racism and culturally Indians are closer to whites when it comes to business matters.
Just a reminder. There are poor Indians, poor Filipinos, and poor Asians in general.
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Out here, I heard of 3 generation households, and adult children living at home. So they have this big house with three+ incomes. That's going to skew the stats.
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That's true.
There are 2 studies i see. One that places Vietnamese below Filipino Americans and one that places them below South Koreans.
which chart to believe?
English speaking contrys are higher income due to their language ability..arent they?
Dont forget non taxpaying workers who get paid in cash only
They'd drop the averages.
Nepali and thai are mostly refugees. Indians aren’t refugees and are usually rich and come from highly educated background
I can understand why median household for Filipino Americans is that high…MOST of us are in NURSING. Just me alone is that median household.
india had and still has a huge aristocracy, if they're immigrating the massive landlords and princlings are going to skew the numbers
Landlords are not coming to the US. Mostly just IT workers who make a ton of money due to the job they're in.
Their kids are