WASHINGTON: Even as Indian-Americans boast of having the highest per capita income among all the major ethnic groups in the US, more than 8% of the nearly three million community are living below the poverty line, says a latest census report.
The 2007-2011 American Community Survey has said that 42.7 million people in the US had income below the poverty level. The national poverty rate is 14.7%.
With 8.2% 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% poverty rate.
For the Asian population, poverty rates were higher for Vietnamese (14.7%) and Koreans (15%), but the Filipinos have the lowest poverty rate of 5.8%. Among Hispanics, national poverty rates ranged from a low of 16.2% for Cubans to a high of 26.3% 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%. American Indian and Alaska Native (27.0%) and black or African-American (25.8%).
Rates were above the overall national average for Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders (17.6%), while poverty rates for people identified as white (11.6%) or Asian (11.7%) were lower than the overall poverty rate.