Living South Asian in the U.S.
South Asian Americans, constitute a diverse group of people that include Indian Americans, Bangladeshi Americans, Bhutanese Americans, Nepalese Americans, Pakistani Americans, and Sri Lankan Americans.
With a growth rate of 69.37%, Indian Americans (or Asian Americans) are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States. As of 2010, The New York-New Jersey- PA region recorded the greatest number of Indian Asians (526,133), and New York City contains by far the highest Indian American population of any individual city in North America, estimated at 227,994 as of 2014.
The best and the brightest in the field with adequate resources to support their transition, seek to move to the US to further their education and careers, most commonly in the fields of medicine & healthcare, technology, and business. This population tends to include younger, affluent and well-educated Asians who are at times heralded as one of the most successful minority groups in the country.
Indians make up the largest non-Caucasian segment of the American medical community and roughly 20 percent of the “International Medical Graduates” – or foreign-trained doctors – operate in the U.S.
The global technology landscape has similarly been impacted by immigrants of Indian origin. Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft), Sunder Pichai (CEO of Google), Rajiv Suri (CEO of Nokia) Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe) and Vinod Khosla (founding CEO of Sun Microsystems)
are just a few major players, that have revolutionized technology. It comes as no surprise that 16% of start-ups in Silicon Valley who have Indian co-founders even though Indians represent just 6% of the region’s population. An August 2016 article in the LA times recognizes Indian immigrants as “Tech’s new titans”.
Indo-Americans (Asians from the Indian subcontinent) have also carved their path into government and politics (Kamala Harris, Bobby Jindal, Pramila Jayapal, Nikki Haley), journalism (Sanjay Gupta, and Fareed Zakaria) and television (Priyanka Chopra, Dev Patel, Nimrat Kaur, and Mindy Kaling).
With a strong educational base, entrepreneurial and technical skills, and high work-ethic, Indians (and Asians) have benefited from upbringings in a culture that stresses humility, close-knit family ties, and respect for all walks of life.
To learn more about the demographic patterns of migration and settlement by Indian Americans including their history of migration, two recent books are noteworthy to mention. The Other One Percent: Indians in America by Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh, and Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans, by Sangay K Mishra. Written by authors who are academics at universities in the US, both works present an articulate and engaging account of the early history of the community’s presence in the United States.
However, despite the high achievement status that Indian Asians & the Asian American & Pacific Islander community (community AAPI) in the US have achieved, they have simultaneously struggled with the stereotype of being a “model minority”. The characterization of excelling academically in math and science as well as being a model that other ethnic and racial groups should aspire to be. This model minority label is also perpetuated by the members of the community themselves when they place excessive stress on their children.
As is true of any immigrant experience, reconciling your roots with where your feet are currently planted, remains both a challenge and an opportunity for growth. It involves a delicate balance of holding on and letting go. How South Asians work through the process of assimilating their eastern values and ideologies with western norms, traditions and world views will depend greatly on their ability to shed the need for acceptance and recognition and to fully embrace and accept themselves as nuanced and complex, universally true of all beings.
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