Indians lead Asians in income, education in US

Washington: Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the US with Indian Americans leading them all in their levels of income and education, according to a new survey.

Seven in 10 Indian-American adults ages 25 and older have a college degree, compared with about half of Americans of Korean, Chinese, Filipino and Japanese ancestry, and about a quarter of Vietnamese Americans, according to the Pew Research Centre report released on Tuesday.

Indians also have the highest median household income of $88,000 among the largest Asian-American groups. Asians as a whole have a median household income of $66,000 compared with the US median of $49,800.

On the other side of the socio-economic ledger, Americans with Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and "other US Asian" origins have a higher poverty rate than does the US general public, while those with Indian, Japanese and Filipino origins have lower rates, the survey of six major Asian groups found.

Their geographic settlement patterns also differ. More than seven in 10 Japanese and two-thirds of Filipinos live in the West, compared with fewer than half of Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans, and only about a quarter of Indians.

There are sub-group differences in social and cultural realms as well. Japanese and Filipino Americans are the most accepting of interracial and intergroup marriage; Koreans, Vietnamese and Indians are less comfortable.

Their pathways into the US are different, the Pew survey found. About half of all Korean and Indian immigrants who received green cards in 2011 got them on the basis of employer sponsorship, compared with about a third of Japanese, a fifth of Chinese, one-in-eight Filipinos and just one percent of Vietnamese.

Compared with the general public, Asian Americans are more likely to support an activist government and less likely to identify as Republicans, according to the Pew report.

Indian Americans are the most heavily Democratic Asian subgroup (65 percent), while Filipino Americans and Vietnamese Americans are the most evenly split between the two parties.

President Barack Obama gets higher ratings from Asian Americans than from the general public: 54 percent approve of the way he is handling his job compared with 44 percent of the general public, the survey found.