Indian Americans surpass Filipinos as state’s largest API group
By Matthew Barakat/AP
The Loehmann Twin Cinema has run only Indian-language films for the last three years, and it has no shortage of potential customers.
Census figures released last week show that Indian Americans have become the largest Asian American group in Virginia, surpassing Filipino Americans.
They are concentrated in northern Virginia, in and around communities such as Falls Church. Fairfax County alone is home to more than half the state’s South Asian Americans and large numbers of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese Americans.
Hung Nguyen, manager of a Vietnamese noodle house near Falls Church, estimated that 70 percent of his customers are not Vietnamese.
“Look at the tables,” Nguyen said, pointing to a busy lunch crowd. “We are a model of Fairfax County. There’s American, Asian, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese.”
Still, Nguyen said the restaurant relies on a core Vietnamese American customer base. As the Vietnamese American population has expanded and spread throughout the county, so has the restaurant, which has about a half-dozen locations.
At the movie theater, manager Purushottam Sharma said his customers include Iranians, Afghanis and Nepalese, as well as Indians. On weekends, if the film is popular, people will drive in from Richmond, 95 miles away.
“Sometimes we’ll even get an American,” he said.
The census figures show that Virginia’s Indian American population has increased 138 percent between 1990 and 2000, from 20,494 to 48,815. The Indian category includes Pakistanis. One major factor in the fast growth of the Indian American population is the H-1B visa program, which since 1992 has let foreigners with special skills come to the United States on a six-year work visa and apply for a green card with an employer’s sponsorship.
Since 1992, Indians have accounted for 40 percent of all the H-1B visas granted, Immigration and Naturalization Service spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt said. The next closest country is China, with 10 percent.
Roughly half of those H-1B visas go to people in computer-related jobs, Schmidt said. That’s a perfect fit for northern Virginia, which experienced a boom in high-tech businesses in the 1990s.
In Virginia, the second-fastest growing Asian American group is the Vietnamese American population, which increased 80 percent to 37,309 last year. |
