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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 yesterday.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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