8.2 per cent of Indian-Americans live below poverty line

Even as Indian-Americans boast of having the highest per capita income among all the major ethnic groups in the US, more than 8 per cent of the nearly three million community is living below the poverty line, according to 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 per cent.

With 8.2 per cent 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 an 8.2 per cent poverty rate. For the Asian population, poverty rates were higher for Vietnamese (14.7 per cent) and Koreans (15.0 per cent), but the Filipinos have the lowest poverty rate of 5.8 per cent.

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 per cent (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 per cent for Cubans to a high of 26.3 per cent 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 per cent: American Indian and Alaska Native (27.0 per cent) and black or African-American (25.8 per cent).

Rates were above the overall national average for Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders (17.6 per cent), while poverty rates for people identified as white (11.6 per cent) or Asian (11.7 per cent) 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 per cent, about nine percentage points higher than the overall US rate.

US government 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.