8th Ave Chinatown in Brooklyn Photo: Eric R. Bechtold/Wikimedia Commons
What is the first thing that springs to mind at the mention of Asians-Americans?
Chinese workers and small business owners, Korean business and tech experts, countless Indian IT professionals, thousands of Pakistani doctors working across the United States. Or simply all of the above.
Surely, Asian-Americans have come a long way since waves of immigrants arrived in the 1970s and 1990s.
Today, Asians are the highest-earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., on average.
That brings them a newfound influence with money and political participation, getting new spotlight.
The Silicon Valley has about 23 % Asians. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon remarked that there are too many Asian chief executive officers in the Silicon Valley.
This year, Tim Kaine described how immigrants – many of them Chinese, Indians, Koreans and Pakistanis – have transformed Virginia’s economy.
But behind the picture of their success is also a story of inequality.
A Pew Research report this week revealed that overall prosperity of Asians “conceals a wide and rapidly growing economic divide between higher- and lower-income Asians.”
But one conclusion of the report stands out: “Today, income inequality in the U.S. is greatest among Asians.”
What can explain this trend? Immigration of low-skilled workers for decades before 1990s, and the majority of Asian population not being U.S.-born and U.S-educated.
The Pew has this to say:
“From 1970 to 2016, the gap in the standard of living between Asians near the top and the bottom of the income ladder nearly doubled, and the distribution of income among Asians transformed from being one of the most equal to being the most unequal among America’s major racial and ethnic groups.
“In this process, Asians displaced blacks as the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the U.S., according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data. While Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups.”
The research organization also describes why inequality is harmful for any group or community.
“An increase in income inequality matters because of the potential for social and economic consequences. People at the lower rungs of the income ladder may experience diminished economic opportunity and mobility and have less political influence. Researchers have also linked growing inequality to greater geographic segregation by income. In addition, there is evidence that rising inequality may harm overall economic growth by reducing consumption levels, causing excessive borrowing by lower- to middle-income families, or limiting investment in education.”
Inequality is measured by what is known as the 90/10 ratio, which, according to Pew, takes the ratio of the income needed to place among the top 10% of earners in the U.S. (the 90th percentile) to the income at the threshold of the bottom 10% of earners (the 10th percentile).
The report offers a lot of interesting conclusions from data and trends among Asians as it looks at the factors shaping the group’s economic fortunes.
