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I was playing-- ahem, "working" on the Census website today, because I got distracted by reading this article. I in typical nerd, need to fact check it.
What this means is that by 2010 Indian-Americans will reach the 4.5 million mark, while South Asians will cross the 5.5 million mark. In other words Desis are expected to constitute 1.5 % of the total American population of 2010.
Recall that according to previous census counts Asian Indians increased 110 percent from 428,224 (1980) to 815,447 (1990), and 106% from 815,447 (1990) to 1,678,765 (2000). The Census also ranked Asian Indians as the third largest Asian American group after Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans. Indian Americans also had the largest percentage increase of the six major Asian groups in the U.S.
Or course, reading this made me think where the heck are all these people living? I did some Census crunching on South Asian Americans using the 2000 data (despite what that article said, 2005 ACS ethnic breakdown is so sketch) and this is what I got, based on Metropolitan areas. South Asian American is defined as Asian Indians + Bangladeshis+ Pakistanis + Sri Lankans.
Top Cities of South Asian Americans
- NYC (251,121)
- Chicago (132,811)
- Washington DC tri-state area (90,705)
- Los Angeles/Long Beach (73,489)
- Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon, NJ (71,116)
- San Jose (70,581)
- Houston (63,657)
- Oakland (59,103)
- Philadelphia (48,240)
- Dallas (46,182)
- Detroit (45,459)
- Nassau-Suffolk, NY (40,670)
- Boston (33,336)
- Orange County (31,914)
- Newark, NJ (30,614)
- Bergen-Passaic NJ (29,429)
- Jersey City, NJ (23,675)
- Seattle (20,475)
- San Fransisco (19,170)
- Baltimore, MD (18,738)
Interesting, very interesting... Now what would happen if we compare this top twenty list to that of the top 20 angriest cities in the nation? Would there be any commonalities?
Detriot (3rd Angriest/11th Desi)
Baltimore (4th Angriest/20th Desi)
Dallas (16th Angriest/10th Desi)
Houston (17th Angriest/7th Desi)
THAT's it. You know what this tells me? Where there are desis, there are far less angry people. Or non-desis be hella more angry than us brown folks. People should heed and move to cities with more desis. They will be much happier.
I can't remember the last time I sat by on the sideline for an election season. For the first time ever, I find myself this election season not standing in front of a table with voter registration forms and a clipboard, but rather crunching numbers behind the scene. And can I just say, how good it feels? To be developing the resources needed to help other people do the work of voter campaigning?
Unfortunately, I keep going to all these events this summer, and am realizing that they are the perfect events for people to be standing registering voters. And there is no one there registering voters. Was I the only psycho in Southern California that saw a group of young desis and thought, "I need to register these folks?" Unfortunately, I think I was. I'm going to grab me a stack of voter reg forms and start carrying them around the way I carry around my business cards, I think, and taking them to all these places.
This is the first election cycle that I actually don't know with whom I'll be working. Which could be a lot of fun, doing whatever I feel free to do up until Election Day in November. Knowing my life, stories abound, I've set this blog up to chronologize my life in the voter circuit for a campaign cycle. Usually my writing tends to stray from that so it'll be nice to have a space purely for the sake of tracking my life during an election cycle, and to track my experiences as a voter organizer, as an activist, as a policy student all at the same time. I'm planning on using this space purely for the sake of "work" i.e. writings on *my* versions of political organizing, and basically, stuff that I wouldn't mind an employer stumbling upon. And hopefully a writing space where the pieces can be further expanded on and published at a later time.
So there you have it. A new blog. Don't worry, I'll still maintain the other one, likely more frequently than this one. But you know, a new space is needed for new ideas.
