For Mubeena Khan, the United States appeared to offer the life that many independent-minded women from India dream of, especially those with college degrees: a career that supports a middle-class lifestyle, less gender bias than back home and freedom to practice a strict form of their religion.
Nearly four years after arriving in Chicago, however, Khan is less certain than ever that this dream will be fulfilled. Khan and her family, including her husband and three young children, are among a surprisingly large percentage of Chicago’s ethnic Asians who live beneath the poverty line.
“I am following my culture and trying to do what I can for my children to lead a good life, but I am struggling,” said Khan. “We are living hand to mouth now, and we need to do more for our kids.”
Long recognized as one of the most prosperous minority groups, Asian-Americans nationwide enjoy overall incomes and educational rates higher than whites as well as most other minority groups. That holds true in Chicago’s suburbs, as well, but the story is very different in the city, where many ethnic Asians are mired in poverty deeper than most other minorities, including African-Americans and Latinos.
An analysis of recently released data from the 2000 census reveals an intricate portrait of the region’s Asian community, one that in some ways defies stereotypes. The analysis shows that a wide economic gulf exists between many city-dwelling Asian ethnic groups and their suburban counterparts–a gulf larger than is found inside any other racial group.
The disparity in median household incomes between city and suburban residents of Asian descent was vast–almost $30,000 per household. The median income for Chicago’s Asians in 1999 was $40,519; for suburbanites, it was an extremely healthy $70,686.
More Top Picks Best Kneeboards
Perhaps the biggest barrier to economic vitality is not speaking English, the data revealed. Ethnic Asian groups with a large percentage of members not fluent in English (Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese) had higher poverty rates and lower incomes than ethnic groups with high percentages of English speakers (Indians, Filipinos). Indeed, nearly one-third of Koreans in the city were living in poverty, a rate higher than that for blacks or Latinos.
The Census Bureau’s racial category “Asian” encompasses a wide variety of ethnic groups, from Indians and Pakistanis to Cambodians and Vietnamese–diverse populations that arrive here with varying levels of education, job skills and capital. The differences often lead to greatly different positions of wealth.
Demographers, educators and social scientists have taken a keen interest in the evolving Asian community because its rapidly growing size has implications for schools, social service agencies and the region’s economy. About one-third of the nearly 375,000 Asians in the region live in the city, where in 2000 they composed just 4.3 percent of the population.
Still, the Asian population in the city grew 26 percent in the 1990s, a rate outpaced only by Hispanics.
While these groups are scattered widely in the Chicago suburbs, mostly to the north and northwest of the city, specific ethnic enclaves have developed in the city. People of Indian ancestry have settled along Devon Avenue on the North Side, while Vietnamese staked out a corridor along Argyle Street and Chinese have congregated in Chinatown.
Koreans are older
Among the various Asian ethnic groups, the city’s Korean population fared the worst economically during the 1990s, the data showed.
More than 30 percent of the city’s Korean-Americans lived below the poverty line. When the census was conducted, the federally defined poverty line stood at $17,029 for a family of four. While Asian-Americans in the suburbs measured a poverty rate of 4 percent, in Chicago it was 18 percent.
But those statistics don’t tell the whole story.
The peak period of Korean immigration to the U.S. came during the second half of the 1980s when more than 34,000 arrived each year. Many of those Koreans were students or young families, and they eventually coaxed their parents to move here, as well.
Those older Koreans, whose incomes are low because they are retired, tend to live in the city, where they have better access to subsidized housing and public transportation. In fact, nearly 17 percent of the city’s Korean population is more than 65 years old, compared with about 4 percent in the suburbs.
Nevertheless, the language barrier is perhaps the most significant reason for the high poverty rate of Koreans in the city, experts said.
Census data showed that 47 percent of Korean households in the city are “linguistically isolated,” defined as household inhabitants at least 14 years old who possess poor English skills.
That is particularly true of the elderly immigrants from Korea. On a recent weekday at the Center for Seniors, 5230 N. Kedzie Ave., not one of the roughly 85 seniors who came to exercise and mingle with other Koreans could speak English.
`Frail and weak’
As their children lead middle-class lives in the suburbs, the seniors drink coffee at a corner McDonald’s and meet each other at the senior center. Jae Ha, co-director of the center, said many initially suffer from emotional and physical dislocation. “They come in looking pale and frail and weak, but then they eat good here and have happier times,” Ha said. “We see their physical and mental health improving each day.”
Korean-American leaders maintain that their community is vastly undercounted because many ethnic Koreans cannot decipher census forms and think they don’t need to fill them out because they are not citizens. Some Korean community activists estimate the total Korean population in Illinois as high as 100,000, but the 2000 census counted 51,453 Korean-Americans in the state.
Many Koreans drift toward running mom-and-pop stores in poor neighborhoods around the city, said Jin Lee, business planning director of the non-profit Albany Park Community Center Inc. on the Northwest Side. It is not just the elderly with low incomes–23 percent of city Koreans under 65 live in poverty.
“Business is the only way for them to survive quickly and put [food] on their family’s table,” Lee said, adding that language problems have forced white-collar professionals from Korea to take factory and service-sector jobs here.
A couple struggles
But economic struggles are not limited to just those suffering from emotional dislocation or those hindered by language issues and meager education.
Khan, the 30-year-old mother from India, has a bachelor’s degree in business studies, as does her husband, Mohammed Abdul Marayees. But the couple have had difficulty finding regular employment since their arrival in the Chicago area in 1999. They are among the 19 percent of the city’s Indian population who live in poverty.
Amid the airline industry’s woes, Marayees was furloughed from his middle management job with an airline and began driving a cab. He now drives in the evening and works as a travel consultant by day.
Meanwhile, Khan has discovered that her initial desire to become a nurse consumed too many hours of study and classroom work for her to raise her three small children. Then she lost her office assistant’s position with the Salvation Army because of budget cuts.
She spent $6,000 to get a certificate in cosmetology and styles hair in the family’s apartment at Devon and California Avenues to help make ends meet.
“We thought the United States was a good place to take our abilities and use them for work,” Khan said. “But since we have arrived here, it is very hard get into the system and stay there.” Advocates for struggling Asian-Americans say that the plight of the impoverished among them often is overlooked by the mainstream of Asian communities. Being stereotyped as the highly successful “model minority” can work against them, advocates said.
“So many Asians become so hypocritical like so many other Americans,” said Sudha A. Bhatt, assistant principal of Passages School, a charter school run by Asian Human Services Inc. “They have finished their struggle and found their prosperity and moved to the suburbs. They tend to forget that there are so many people back in the city who need so much.”
Abha Pandya, executive director of Asian Human Services, said the search for private funding for her Uptown-based social service agency from suburban Asians has been a chore.
“For people who’ve been here a long time, their family members are coming in and they don’t have the same level of skills or training,” Pandya said. “They have a feeling that they can just show up here in the land of milk and honey and they’ll prosper. And they don’t realize that without the language, without any marketable skills, they just cannot function.”
Filipinos and wealth
Filipinos are the most economically successful of all the Asian ethnic groups, according to the census data. People of Filipino descent led all the groups with a median household income of $55,164 in the city and $76,466 in the suburbs.
While language isolation for ethnic Koreans and Vietnamese hovered near 50 percent, less than 11 percent of Filipinos fell into this group, the census showed.
Many of the Chicago region’s Filipinos arrived after immigration laws were loosened in the mid-1960s. That’s when thousands of white-collar professionals, particularly in the medical industry, emigrated from the Philippines.
Among them were Nunilo Rubio and his wife, Elenita.
The couple, both physicians, came to the Chicago area in 1967 to take further medical training. They settled in Wilmette and have raised three children, all of whom are studying to be doctors.
Not seeing need
Still, with so many American success stories like the Rubios, it is difficult to engage people of Filipino descent to become politically and socially active, complained Elsie Sy-Niebar, a social worker with the Chicago Department of Human Services. With their Filipino friends and family so financially secure, they often fail to see that there are newer immigrants in need.
“Because Filipinos are part of the `ideal minority’ picture painted by the American media . . . my fellow Filipino-Americans could not believe it when I tell them, `Yes, kababayan’–the Filipino word for compatriot– `there are quite a few homeless Filipinos in the city,'” Sy-Niebar said. “Some live in a non-running car and some on the streets.”
Micaela di Leonardo, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, said it is important not to view Asian-Americans as a monolithic entity.
“We have a tendency to see any labeled group . . . as unitary,” said di Leonardo, who studies race, gender and economic issues in urban life. “We want to lump and see all Asians as the same, all Latinos as the same, but they’re not. They’re extraordinarily divided among themselves and those divisions are very meaningful.”
– – –
Impoverished Asians
Despite stereotypes about Asians being well off, some Chicago Asian groups are among the poorest ethnic groups in the city.
%%
POVERTY RATES
CHICAGO
For selected groups
Korean 30.4%
Black 29.4%
More Top Picks Best Blue Light Glasses Under 50
Vietnamese 21.2%
Latino 20%
Chinese 19.5%
City avg. 19.6%
Asians 18%
SIX-COUNTY-AREA SUBURBS
Average 5.6%
Asians 4%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
baiduhai
Chicago-area Asians span economic spectrum
A Tribune analysis of 2000 census data released this summer revealed vast
disparities within the Chicago area’s Asian population. Among the
key findings:
Suburban Asians better off
Asians in the suburbs have higher incomes and lower poverty rates than
their city counterparts.
SUBURBS
Poverty rate* 4%
Median household income $70,686
CHICAGO
Poverty rate* 18%
Median household income $40,519
Language barriers lower income
Asian groups in the city who have the most difficulty
speaking English have the lowest household incomes.
ETHNIC ASIAN GROUP LINGUISTIC ISOLATION** MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME
Korean 47% $20,401
Vietnamese 49.1% $35,774
Chinese 42% $36,853
Indian 13.8% $42,979
Filipino 10.8% $55,164
Koreans among most impoverished
Poverty rates for some Chicago city Asians exceed rates of other
ethnic groups.
All Asians 18%
City average 19.6%
Korean 30.4%
Vietnamese 21.2%
Chinese 19.5%
Indian 18.8%
Filipino 7.2%
Black 29.4%
Latino 20%
White 8.2%
Poverty level for a family of four was an annual household income of
$17,029 or less in 1999.
**Linguistic isolation refers to households in which all members 14 years
or older have difficulty speaking English.
More Top Picks Best Ventless Propane Heaters
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
baiduhai
%%