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Census Shows Asian Wave in New Jersey

Aseem Chhabra

A year and a half ago, when Sanjeev Mahajan wanted to leave Chicago to start his own Internet solutions business, he considered moving with his family to California. Instead he moved to North Brunswick in New Jersey's Middlesex County. It helped that he could send his grown up children to the county's well established educational institutions.

His daughter now attends Rutgers University in New Brunswick and his son is a senior at North Brunswick Township High School, a blue ribbon public school.

Mahajan is among of the thousands of Indian Americans who have moved to the Middlesex County in the past ten years, a new breed of immigrants who have been drawn to the area by the proximity of the New Jersey's high tech, electronics and pharmaceutical industries. The Middlesex county is also connected by the New Jersey Transit train to Manhattan's Penn Station.

"If you see the Northeast Corridor line pull up at Penn Station, you will find hoards of Indians getting off the train," Mahajan said. The Northeast Corridor train stops at New Brunswick, Edison (home to the famous Little India shopping center on Oak Tree Road) and Metuchen towns in the Middlesex County, before passing through one of the tunnels under the Hudson River en route to New York City.

According to information released by the US Census Bureau last week and further analysis done by the New Jersey Department of Labor, Asians are the fastest growing racial group in the state of New Jersey. With the 2000 population of over 480,000, Asians constitute approximately 6 pc of the state's population, up from 4 pc in 1990. In 2000, more than one in every two Asians in New Jersey were concentrated in just three counties in the state -- Middlesex, Bergen and Hudson.

Towns in Bergen County include Fort Lee, Englewood and Hackensack. Hoboken, Jersey City and Secaucus are located in the Hudson County. Although detailed population data is not yet available, these towns contain a fairly large South Asian (especially Indian) population. A sign of the strength of the Indian population in these three counties -- for the last few years these towns have been hosting some of the largest Navaratri celebrations in the US, where on a given night, over 20,000 Indians are seen dancing dandia-raas.

The current census information for New Jersey (so far the census bureau has only released data for New Jersey) is broken by race and not ethnicity. Asians as a racial group include South Asians, as well as immigrants from other Far Eastern countries, including China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea. Detailed data on ethnicity will not be available until June 2001.

According to Parag Khandhar, a policy associate and a census coordinator at the Asian American Federation of New York (AAFNY), the ethnicity data will be broken up into 16 separate Asian categories, including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan. The 2000 census forms gave people the option of selecting one of the following Asian ethnicities -- Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. Khandhar added that people also had the option of printing an ethnicity of their choice.

The geographical level to which the details will be available is referred to as a census tract -- each with a population of 10,000 people. New York City, for instance has approximately 6,000 census tracts.

"So we will be able to identify quite closely where these people (the South Asian community) are living," Khandhar said.

A part of the challenge would be to identify and to count people of Indian origin who were born in the Caribbean, Fiji or Africa and later migrated to the United States. The Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens, New York for instance has a very large Indo-Caribbean population (mostly from Guyana).

"That is something we are very concerned about," Khandhar said. "There are a lot of different answers to that, but it depends on how they filled out the forms."

The data that will be released through this summer will also show how populations in the US have shifted from one region to another. For instance, recent reports have indicated that high rents and congested living spaces are driving a large number of Bangladeshi families from the neighborhood of Astoria in Queens, New York to Hamtramck, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan.

According to one estimate, the Bangladeshi population of Hamtramck has grown from a few thousand in the mid-1990s to 15,000-20,000 this year. There are six Bangladeshi grocery stores in the area. The newest restaurant to open in Hamtramck is Aladdin Sweets and Café, which also has branches in Astoria and Jackson Heights, Queens.

Another concern relates to people of mixed races -- one part Indian and one part anything else. People like Ron Roy, a research scientist at IBM's facility in Westchester County, just north of New York City. Roy was born in the US to an Indian father and a Caucasian mother. Last year for the first time the census bureau allowed people to check more than one race.

"I remembering checking Asian Indian and the white Caucasian categories," Roy said. "I generally identify myself as ethnically Indian, but that is mostly a cultural thing. My maternal grandmother's family is from Eastern Europe. And according to my maternal grandfather, his family descended from Cherokee Indians and also Ponce de Leon, who searched for the Fountain of Youth and discovered Florida."

Roy added that technically he could not check Native American as one of his race. "I think you have to be more than one-eighth," he said. "And I wouldn't quite get up to that level."

The mixed race issue becomes essential for redistricting purposes -- redrawing the lines for local, state and federal elections, Khandhar said. The neighborhood of Flushing (in Queens, New York), for instance -- which is heavily populated with Chinese, Korean, Indian and other Asian groups, was split into three different districts for the New York State Assembly. There is no Asian representation from Flushing or for that matter from any other district in the New York State Assembly and Senate.

Asians also do not have an elected official in the New York City council. Currently there are 13 Asian Americans, including five of South Asian origin, who are contesting for this year's city council races.

"Redistricting is critical," Khandhar said. "It is important that we are not cut off in little pieces. It is of paramount importance not just now, but we have to then live with these lines for 10 years."

The census is an official headcount of people living in the United States on April 1, 2000. This will include American citizens, permanent residents, those who were living on a large assortment of visas -- F1, H-1B, G4, etc. and even undocumented illegal immigrants.

If a housing unit was registered as a postal address, that unit should have received a form, Khandhar said. The forms were sent to the address -- the housing unit and not to a specific person or the head of the household.

"They definitely missed people, like when there might be more than one family under one address," Khandhar said. "That's the part of the problem."

Khandhar said the US government did not make an all out effort to educate the ethnic communities about the importance of filling out census forms. Beside English, the forms were available in five other languages -- Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Tagalog. The census bureau provided instructions in 49 different languages (including Bengali, Hindi, Tibetan and Urdu), but people did not know where to get them, Khandhar added.

All the census advertisements for the South Asian community were aimed at people from India. In addition, the advertisements were only in English. It was then that AAFNY and other community groups stepped in with posters in Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi.

"We were in Jackson Heights helping people fill out the forms, because we sensed that there were so many people who hadn't even received the forms," Khandhar said. "We had restaurant workers coming out and filling the forms, because when we explained it to them, they felt it was important for them."

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