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This article was first published 11 years ago

8.2% Indian Americans live below poverty line

Last updated on: February 21, 2013 11:21 IST

Image: A child waits in line with her mother to receive goods from the Feed The Children relief organization in New York.
Photographs: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters.

Boasting of having the highest per capita income among all the major ethnic groups, more than eight percent of the nearly three million Indian Americans are living below the poverty line in the US, a latest Census report revealed.

According to the 2007-2011 American Community Survey, 42.7 million people in the United States had income below the poverty level. The national poverty rate is 14.7 percent.

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8.2% Indian Americans live below poverty line

Image: A homeless man sits on a bench with a cup of chili that he received from the Salvation Army in Washington.
Photographs: Jim Young/Reuters.

With 8.2 percent of poverty rate, Indian Americans are far less poor than other ethnic groups and the national average, the Census Bureau report said.

The Japanese Americans too have a 8.2 percent poverty rate. For the Asian population, poverty rates were higher for Vietnamese (14.7 percent) and Koreans (15.0 percent), but the Filipinos have the lowest poverty rate of 5.8 percent.

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8.2% Indian Americans live below poverty line

Image: A young girl jumps rope on the sidewalk next to her family's belongings after she, her parents, and her four brothers and sisters, received a court order of eviction due to foreclosure, in Waco, Texas.
Photographs: Larry Downing/Reuters.

Poverty rates for Vietnamese and Koreans were not statistically different from each other.

According to the report, for Asians, nine states had poverty rates below 10 percent (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia and South Carolina).

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8.2% Indian Americans live below poverty line

Image: People line up for an early Thanksgiving meal served to the homeless at the Los Angeles Mission in downtown Los Angeles.
Photographs: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters.

Among Hispanics, national poverty rates ranged from a low of 16.2 percent for Cubans to a high of 26.3 percent for Dominicans.

In its report the Census Bureau said two race groups had poverty rates more than 10 percentage points higher than the national rate of 14.3 percent: American Indian and Alaska Native (27.0 percent) and black or African- American (25.8 percent). 

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8.2% Indian Americans live below poverty line

Image: Rob Bennett (L), Kami Ballard (C), and James Meece at a homeless tent city in Sacramento, California.
Photographs: Max Whittaker/Reuters.

Rates were above the overall national average for Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders (17.6 percent), while poverty rates for people identified as white (11.6 percent) or Asian (11.7 percent) were lower than the overall poverty rate.

Poverty rates for whites and Asians were not statistically different from each other.

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8.2% Indian Americans live below poverty line

Image: People wait in line at the Fred Jordan Mission to be one of the approximately 10,000 underprivileged children and families to receive new toys, warm clothes, blankets and Christmas dinner food bags at Fred Jordan Mission's 66th annual Family Christmas Celebration and Toy Party in Los Angeles.
Photographs: Danny Moloshok/Reuters.

The Hispanic population had a poverty rate of 23.2 percent, about nine percentage points higher than the overall US rate.

The US Government's definition of poverty is based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2012 was set at an annual income of $23,050 (nearly Rs 12 lakhs) which for a family of four.

Tags: US
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