Why Indian immigrants earn higher than others in America?

Immigrants born in India outdo others in achieving economic success in the Untied States. At the same time, Pakistan-born immigrants, while trailing behind Indians, do better than the native-born Americans. While both immigrant groups originate in South Asia, huge disparities in their economic success exist in the US that needs further exploration.

The estimates reported in the 2010 American Community Survey revealed that the median salaried household income of India-born immigrants was around $94,700. In comparison, the median household income of native-born Americans was estimated at $51,750. Unlike the Pakistan-born immigrants in Canada, who lagged behind others in economic prosperity, Pakistanis in America are relatively thriving where the median household income of Pakistan-born immigrants is 18% higher than that of the native-born Americans.

The American Community Survey for 2010 (latest data available from the US Census Bureau) reveal that amongst South Asians living in the US, India-born immigrants are far ahead of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Afghanis. Even when compared with immigrants from Egypt, a country known for supplying highly educated immigrants to the US, Indians report exceptionally higher indicators of economic progress.

Source: American Community Survey, 2010

Indian-born immigrants also reported one of the lowest poverty rates at 4%. Afghanistan-born immigrants reported the highest poverty rate where one in five Afghan immigrants was deemed below the poverty line in the US. While Pakistan-born immigrants reported higher median household incomes than the native-born Americans, surprisingly 14% of the Pakistan-born immigrants were below the poverty line compared to only 9.4% of the native-born Americans.

Another indicator of financial distress amongst households in North America is the percentage of household income spent on gross rent. Households spending 30 percent or more of household income on rent are considered financially distressed. Amongst households who live in rental units, 57% of the immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt spent more than 30% of the household income on rent compared to only 24% of immigrants from India.

Source: American Community Survey, 2010

These poverty statistics raise several questions. For instance, despite having similar South Asian heritage, Pakistan-born immigrants report a 2.4-times higher rate of poverty than their Indian counterparts. Furthermore, poverty among younger cohorts (18 years old or younger) is even worse amongst immigrants from Pakistan than from India. At the same time almost 50% of under-18 Afghan immigrants are reportedly below the poverty line in the US. These statistics necessitate the need to explore the reasons behind disparities amongst immigrants from South Asia.

I am presenting here a socio-economic comparison of South Asians in the US. I have restricted the reporting to immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. This is done because India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and to some extent Afghanistan have more in common in culture and recent history than other countries in South Asia. I have thrown in Egypt for good measure to serve as a control for immigrants from another Muslim country with a different cultural background.

The purpose of this comparative review is to determine what are the reasons behind the success of India-born immigrants in the US. Could it be that the immigrants from India had luck on their side, or could it be that Indian immigrants possessed the necessary ingredients to succeed in the highly competitive labour market in the United States. More importantly, one needs to explore why immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh lag behind those from India in achieving the same levels of economic success.

The immigrant wage gaps have been a focus of several studies in the past. A whole host of theories have been forwarded to explain why such gaps exist. For instance, Nielsen and others (2001) suggest that such gaps exist because of lack of adequate qualifications and assimilation of immigrants in the mainstream. They believe that a “large fraction of that gap would disappear if only immigrants could find employment and thus accumulate work experience.” Aldashev and others (2008) found that the immigrant wage gap in Germany was lower for those who studied in Germany suggesting that improving education in Germany improves immigrants’ income prospects.

Sizing the South Asians

With approximately 1.8 million individuals, India- born immigrants form the largest cohort amongst South Asians in the US. The American Community Survey (ACS) in 2010 estimated Pakistan-born immigrants at 300,000, Bangladesh-born immigrants at 153,000, and Afghanistan-born immigrants at 60,000. Egypt-born immigrants totalled 133,000. Immigrants from India were approximately six-times the size of Pakistan-born immigrants. The relatively large size of Indian immigrants leads to larger social networks, which help with searching for better employment prospects.

Despite their large size, most India-born immigrants in the US are recent arrivals. Whereas 47% of the India-born immigrants arrived in the US after 2000, only 36% of the Pakistan-born immigrants arrived after 2000. This suggests that the economic success of immigrants from India is driven by the recent arrivals. Relatively speaking, immigrants from Afghanistan have enjoyed the longest tenure in the US of all South Asian countries discussed here. Notice that while 42% of immigrants from Afghanistan arrived in the US before 1980, only 25% of the Indian immigrants accomplished the same.

Source: American Community Survey, 2010

Pakistanis have larger families

With 4.3 persons per households, immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan reported significantly larger family sizes. In comparison, the native-born population reported a household size of 2.6 persons whereas the size of India-born immigrant households was around 3.5 persons. The difference between immigrants from India and other South Asians is more pronounced when one looks at the per capita earnings. Owing to their smaller household size, immigrants from India reported significantly higher per capita incomes than the rest. For instance, Bangladesh-born immigrants reported 50% less in median per capita income than those from India. And while immigrants from Pakistan reported higher household incomes than the immigrants from Egypt, the larger household size of Pakistan-born immigrants brought their per capita incomes lower than that of Egyptians.

Larger household size results in overcrowding, especially amongst low-income households, who often live in rental units. The average household size of rental households from Pakistan was found to be 33% larger than the same from immigrants from India. 15% of households from Pakistan were found to have more than one occupant on average per room compared to only 6% of those from India.

Women in the Labour Force

A key source of distinction between the immigrants from India and other South Asians is the higher participation of Indian women in the labour force. A much higher integration of women in the labour force is one of the reasons why immigrants from India have fared much better than others in the United States. Consider that only 42% of the women from Pakistan were active in the labour force in the US compared to 57% women from India. In fact women from Pakistan reported the lowest participation in the labour force in the US falling behind women from Egypt, Afghanistan , and Bangladesh.

Education Matters the Most

It should come as no surprise that immigrants from India are one of the most educated cohort in the United States. Almost 42% of immigrants from India over the age of 25 reported having a graduate (Masters) or a professional degree. In comparison, only 10% of the native-born adults reported having a graduate or professional degree. Approximately 23% of adult immigrants from Egypt and Pakistan reported having a graduate or professional degree.

The correlation between higher education attainment and higher median household incomes is explicitly presented in the graph below. India-born immigrants with professional degrees also reported significantly higher incomes than the rest. In comparison, immigrants from Afghanistan with one of the lowest incidence of professional degrees reportedly the lowest median household incomes.

Source: American Community Survey, 2010

The gender divide is again instrumental between immigrants from India and the rest. Whereas 70% of the India-born female adults reported having a Bachelors degree or higher, only 46% of adult females born in Pakistan reported the same in the US. At the same time only 28% of the native-born female adults in the US reported completing university education.

Better Education Better Careers

The education attainment levels amongst adult immigrants determine, to a large extent, their career choices. University education resulting in professional or graduate degrees allows immigrants to qualify for well-paying jobs in the US. Immigrants from India have been able to use their high-quality education to make inroads in the high-paying employment market. One is therefore hardly surprised to see that of the adult employed population, 70% immigrants from India are working in occupations focussing on management, business, science, and arts. In comparison, only 44% of immigrants from Pakistan ad 33% immigrants from Bangladesh are employed in similar occupations.

What Have We Learnt

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

In 1883, Emma Lazarus asked for the tired, the poor, and the wretched refuse. India instead sent its very best to the United States. Instead of the huddled masses, graduates from Indian Institutes of Technology and Management arrived in hundreds of thousands at the American shores. These immigrants were products of a sophisticated higher education system whose foundations were laid by Pandit Nehru in early fifties.

In the rest of South Asia, especially in Pakistan and Bangladesh, education has never been a national priority. The results of such conflicting priorities are obvious. Graduates from Indian universities are outdoing others in competitive labour markets at home and abroad.

If education is not made a national priority, the gap between Indians and other South Asians will grow at home and in diaspora.

References:

Helena Skyt Nielsen & Michael Rosholm & Nina Smith & Leif Husted, 2004. "Qualifications, discrimination, or assimilation? An extended framework for analysing immigrant wage gaps," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 29(4), pages 855-883, December.

Alisher Aldashev & Johannes Gernandt & Stephan L. Thomsen, 2008. "The Immigrant Wage Gap in Germany," FEMM Working Papers 08019, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Faculty of Economics and Management.

London riots and Toronto’s suburbs

As violence spread through the immigrant dominated, low income, suburban neighbourhoods in UK, it has raised concerns about a similar violent breakdown in low-income neighbourhoods in Canada.

A recent report by Prof. David Hulchanski of the University of Toronto has pointed out the growing disparities between low- and high-income households in Toronto. In this post I argue that while income disparities have increased in central parts of Toronto, concerns about violent breakdown are largely misplaced for most Canadian cities, including Toronto.

In an earlier post I have argued that Professor’s Hulchanski’s results were influenced by the choice of spatial limits used to define ‘Toronto’. It is true that income disparities have worsened in Metropolitan Toronto, which is home to 2.5 million people and covers an area of 250 square miles. However, the increase in income disparities has resulted from outward migration of Toronto’s middle class to suburban municipalities that constitute the greater Toronto area (GTA).

For details see my earlier postings below:

The good, the bad, and the ugly in Toronto

Where is Toronto’s missing middle class? It has suburbanized out of Toronto

A quick review of the 2006 Census data suggest that neighbourhoods in Toronto’s outer suburbs (municipalities that constitute the GTA along with with Metropolitan Toronto) are more egalitarian than the ones in Metropolitan Toronto. The outer suburbs are now the choice digs for Toronto’s middle class, which is lured by abundant supply of affordable housing and other amenities required by households with children. A large number of recent immigrants have also flocked to the suburban parts of the GTA in pursuit of affordable shelter.

One way of comparing Toronto to its neighbouring suburbs is to deploy the same income typology as was used by Professor Hulchanski to categorise neighbourhoods in Toronto. He categorised neighbourhoods (Census Tracts) as follows:

Income quintiles	Neighbourhoods	Percent
Less than 40% average CMA income	134	13.36
Between 20% and 40% below average CMA income	276	27.52
Between 20% above and 20% below average CMA income	398	39.68
Between 20% and 40% above average CMA income	75	7.48
More than 40% above average CMA income	120	11.96
Total	1,003	100

 

CMA in the above table stands for the Census Metropolitan Area that comprises Toronto and most of its suburban municipalities. Toronto CMA has  a population of about 5 million. The above table suggests that in 2006 over 40% neighbourhoods in Toronto region reported average household income below 20% of the regional average.

I produce below tabulations between immigrant population and income quintiles. To account for the impact of recent immigrant concentration on the socio-economics of a neighbourhood, I categorise neighbourhoods based on what percentage of immigrants within a neighbourhood arrived in Canada between 1995 and 2006. Furthermore, I produce two tabulations, one for Metropolitan Toronto, and one for all other municipalities that are part of the Toronto CMA.

The tabulation for Metropolitan Toronto is presented below. Similar to what Professor Hulchanski found, I report that 46% neighbourhoods falling under the highest recent immigrant concentration (category 4) belonged to lowest income category. In comparison, only 4% of the neighbourhoods that were categorised as having the lowest concentration of recent immigrants belonged to the lowest income category. Furthermore, the highest income neighbourhoods were predominantly the ones with lowest concentration of recent immigrants.

However, the situation is quite reversed when the same tabulation is generated for outer suburbs in the Toronto region. Consider the following table where 48% neighbourhoods with the highest recent immigrant concentration corresponded to middle or higher than middle income categories. Only 8% of the highest recent immigrant concentration neighbourhoods fell in the lowest income category in suburban Toronto.

Furthermore, across all concentrations of recent immigrants, i.e., from lowest to the highest, the most frequent income category was the mid income range, i.e., between 20% above and 20% below average CMA income.

In summary, a quick review of Census data from 2006 reveals that Toronto’s outer suburbs are home to the middle class where recent immigrants are enjoying the benefits of affordable housing and other amenities that are not available in Metropolitan Toronto. In addition, Metropolitan Toronto continues to experience higher income disparities that adversely affects recent immigrants at an increasing rate.

Would income inequality result in higher mortality rates for the poor?

The answer for Canada is not necessarily. A study by McGill University’s Nancy Ross found no association between income polarization and mortality rates.

Relation between income inequality and mortality in Canada and in the United States: cross sectional assessment using census data and vital statistics

Abstract

Objective: To compare the relation between mortality and income inequality in Canada with that in the United States.

Design: The degree of income inequality, defined as the percentage of total household income received by the less well off 50% of households, was calculated and these measures were examined in relation to all cause mortality, grouped by and adjusted for age.

Setting: The 10 Canadian provinces, the 50 US states, and 53 Canadian and 282 US metropolitan areas.

Results: Canadian provinces and metropolitan areas generally had both lower income inequality and lower mortality than US states and metropolitan areas. In age grouped regression models that combined Canadian and US metropolitan areas, income inequality was a significant explanatory variable for all age groupings except for elderly people. The effect was largest for working age populations, in which a hypothetical 1% increase in the share of income to the poorer half of households would reduce mortality by 21 deaths per 100 000. Within Canada, however, income inequality was not significantly associated with mortality.

Conclusions: Canada seems to counter the increasingly noted association at the societal level between income inequality and mortality. The lack of a significant association between income inequality and mortality in Canada may indicate that the effects of income inequality on health are not automatic and may be blunted by the different ways in which social and economic resources are distributed in Canada and in the United States.

Where is Toronto’s missing middle class? It has suburbanized out of Toronto

The recent study by the University of Toronto’s (U of T) urban researchers has raised alarms about the increase in income polarization in the City of Toronto where the very rich and the very poor have expanded and the middle class has shrunk over the years. The study raises concerns about the implications of the rising income inequalities in the City of Toronto.

The report is indeed an important contribution to the ongoing dialogue on how to create socially just societies and thus serves as a scorecard on how the City performs on income inequality. The report also mentioned that the  growing number of the very poor in the City of Toronto are immigrants and visible minorities.

While I agree with the general findings of the report, and consider it a must read for those interested in cities, I have though some concerns about the methodology and some implied, yet unstated, conclusions. First the methodology. The authors have focussed on the City of Toronto and have only tangentially mentioned the possibility that the middle class may have migrated to the outer suburbs. I call this phenomenon of suburbanizing middle classes ‘the brown flight’, since immigrants from South and South-East Asia constitute a large number of the new middle class, which has settled in Toronto’s outer suburbs.

Second is the implied assumption that growing income inequality by default is at odds with social cohesion and long-term economic and social viability of the region. This assumes that the social safety nests, which are predominantly supported by the taxes imposed on high and very-high income earners, are incapable of providing short- and long-term services for the very poor in the City. Furthermore, the breakdown of neighbourhoods by income also gives the impression that there may be a socially-optimum breakdown of neighbourhoods by income categories.

I will address below only the first concern in this blog.

I have repeated the analysis done by the authors of the U of T study with two differences. Instead of using individual income, I have based my analysis on household incomes. This does not fundamentally change the distribution  of income profiles mentioned in the U of T study, however it is theoretically more consistent because income manifests itself at the household level more than it does at the individual level. For instance, a poor household is unlikely to have both poor and not poor members of the household. The pooling of income within a household  can help the household deal with poverty better than a single-person, and therefore a single-income, household. My own research on household dynamics in the Peel region suggests that single-person households are more vulnerable to poverty than the rest because of lack of monetary support from other household members. Thus using household income as a metric to study income polarization is better than using individual income.

The City of Toronto is part of the larger urban system or conurbation known as the Greater Toronto Area. Statistics Canada defines Toronto’s conurbation as the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (population 5.1 million, Census 2006) and includes the City of Toronto (population 2.5 million, Census 2006) and the neighbouring suburban municipalities. Some even include Hamilton in the same conurbation.

In an earlier blog on the topic I had suggested that Toronto’s middle class has migrated out of the City of Toronto and has settled in the outer suburbs of Toronto, which are part of the Toronto conurbation. The reason for outward migration of the middle class are rooted in demographics and affordable housing. The middle class comprises of growing families with children who need more shelter space at affordable prices, which is abundantly available in the outer suburbs. Furthermore, financially stable and multigenerational immigrant households abandon Toronto at an increasing rate than the rest since they crave affordable shelter space more than the rest. This creates the spatial mismatch between the shelter needs of the middle class and the small-sized, yet prohibitively expensive, housing stock available in the City of Toronto.

See the map to the right (click on it to see the larger version), which shows the percentage of households with 4 or more persons. The brown and red-coloured census tracts in the suburbs act as proof for the claim that the growing households have left for the suburbs. Similarly, the blue-coloured census tracts in Toronto along the waterfront and in areas of higher income suggest small-sized households comprising either young professionals or empty-nesters, who outbid households with children for shelter space in the choice neighbourhoods.

In this blog I will present evidence to my claim that income polarization in the City of Toronto is a result of the arbitrary boundaries used to define Toronto. These boundaries conform to the political and administrative boundaries of the City, but not to the housing and employment markets observed in the City. The evidence for this argument lies in the commuting patterns observed in the City. My own calculations from the 2006 place of work data from Statistics Canada suggest that almost 600,000 work trips cross City of Toronto’s boundary every day. These are the individuals who either live in Toronto (186,555 trips) and work in the suburbs, or the suburbanites (407,535) who work in Toronto and cross the arbitrary boundaries, which delineate the City, twice every day.

See the map to the right (click on it to see the larger version),  where I have depicted municipal boundaries in grey colour. Also shown are the pre-amalgamation boundaries of Toronto’s former inner suburbs. The green colour neighbourhoods in the map depict the middle class, which is primarily concentrated in Toronto’s outer suburbs. The blue colour low-income cohorts are increasingly concentrated in the amalgamated City of Toronto making a U-shaped poverty concentration around the high-income neighbourhoods concentrated along the Yonge Street.

The correlation between the location of rail tracks in the City of Toronto and the spread of poverty in proximity to rail tracks has not been discussed in detail in the past. The U-shaped poverty visible in the above map is along the rail/subway tracks. Furthermore, I also noticed a significantly large number of homicides committed in the vicinity of rail racks, which are also neighbourhoods depicting poverty (see the map to the right).

The egalitarian suburbs

Toronto’s outer suburbs are far more egalitarian than City of Toronto itself. When I reviewed the income distribution, I was able to replicate the findings from the U of T’s report. Consider the following histogram of household income that illustrates more than 60% residents in the City of Toronto (2.5 million) earn at least 20% less than the average household income ($91,579 for 2005) observed for Toronto CMA (5.1 million people).

The graph also shows that almost 8% of the population lives in Census Tracts (approximate population 4,000) where the average household income is more than 40% of the average household income in Toronto CMA. The numbers presented here are slightly different from what is reported in the U of T study because the U of T study computed the percentage of the census tracts (i.e., land area) and not the percent of population, which I have presented in the above-mentioned graph. The following table is based on the data presented in Map 3 on Page 5 of the U of T study.

The middle class found in suburbia

The most interesting finding emerges when one plots the income distribution for the outer suburbs of the  Toronto CMA, i.e.,  after excluding the City of Toronto from the data set. The resulting histogram is presented below, which is computed for the 2.6 million suburbanites who live in the “905 municipalities”.

The missing middle class is right in the middle of the graph where 60% of the suburbanites live in neighbourhoods where the average household income is within the +/- 20% of the average household income for Toronto CMA. The symmetrical distribution presented in the above graph suggests that the extreme income disparities seen in the City of Toronto do not exist in the outer suburbs of Toronto.

The other main concern in methodology adopted by the U of  T study is the presence of high extreme values in the income variable. The literature on income inequality discusses the issues related with extreme values. The histogram below confirms the existence of the problem where a small number of census tracts report very high incomes in the range of $250,000 and $800,000. A naive method of correcting this problem is to use a trimmed data set that excludes extreme values. However, more statistically robust methods are readily available and have already been programmed in some econometrics software. I will address this issue later in another blog.

There exists in fact a greater heterogeneity in the income distributions within the region. I have plotted income distributions for the nine main municipalities, which are home to 4.6 million of the 5.1 million residents of Toronto CMA. The following graph has been truncated at a maximum household income of $250,000. The graphs below show that the peaks observed for the suburban municipalities are concentrated around the average household income observed in the region ($91,579), whereas the results are skewed for Toronto with a large number of low income concentration as well as a small number of very large income households.

Another way of looking at this issue is to examine the share of population for each income category distributed amongst the select 9 municipalities, including Toronto. The following table illustrates the concept. Notice that 95% of those whose incomes are at least 40% less than the regional average, and 76% of those whose incomes are at least 20% less than the regional average  reside in the City of Toronto. Similarly, 53% of those whose incomes are more than 40% above the regional average also reside in the City of Toronto. This confirms the findings of income equality in the U of T study.

However, more interesting results are reported for the middle income categories. 68% of those whose income falls within +/- 20% of the regional average income, i.e., the middle class, lives in Toronto’s external suburbs. Furthermore, 77% of the slightly well-off households whose incomes are between 20% to 40% higher than the regional average also reside in the outer suburbs.

Also note that the very low income category is non-existent in  Markham, Milton, Oakville, Richmond Hill, and Vaughan.

Lastly, consider the Lorenz curves for the City of Toronto (bottom left) and the 905 municipalities (bottom right).  The Lorenz curve for the City of Toronto reveals a unique distribution, confirming the trends mentioned above where a small number of households earn very large incomes. On the other hand, the Lorenz curve for the outer suburbs suggest mild income inequality.

The good, the bad, and the ugly in Toronto

What happened to the middle class in Toronto? University of Toronto's urban/social geographer, David Hulchanski, and colleagues argue that the middle class has disappeared from Toronto in a recently released update on the growing income disparity in the City of Toronto. They argue that the income disparities have reached new heights where wealth and poverty in extremes define the City.

The report also raises alarm about the urban poor, which in Toronto's case appear to be visible minorities and immigrants who do not posses adequate education or job skills required by the Toronto's specialized job market.

I have a hypothesis, which may help locate Toronto’s missing middle-class. I believe demographics and affordable housing are behind the trends  that the authors have highlighted in their report. The missing middle-class from Toronto, which comprise to a large extent of  immigrants from South Asia and the Asia-Pacific, has perhaps migrated to the outer suburbs in the Durham, Peel, and York regions of the Greater Toronto Area. Furthermore, non-immigrant households with children have also abandoned Toronto in search of affordable housing in the suburbia.

The question to ponder is why financially “successful” immigrants (well-educated professionals who have migrated in the past 20 years to Canada from South Asia and Asia-Pacific) not settle in droves in Toronto after they have gained some economic traction in Canada. And why those immigrants who struggle in the job market stay behind in Toronto?

It appears that the financially “successful” immigrants leave Toronto for demographic reasons. Multi-generational households with children and grandparents need larger homes, which are available in plenty in the outer suburbs and at affordable prices. A 4-bedroom house in a reasonable neighbourhood in Toronto costs in excess of $550,000. The same-size housing unit in a newer neighbourhood in the suburbs costs at least $100,000 less.

Larger household size of the new middle class immigrant households, which cannot be readily fit into the small-sized housing units in the transit accessible, and prohibitively expensive, neighbourhoods in Toronto, may partially explain why the “brown flight” has taken place.

Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census

The missing middle class has abandoned Toronto for the outer suburbs where affordable housing and new infrastructure is in plenty. The housing markets in Mississauga and Brampton, one of the fastest growing places in Canada with a combined population of almost a million people, are to a large extent driven by the immigrants from South Asia. Chinese immigrants drive the housing markets in the York Region, which is situated to the north of the City of Toronto.

The following graphic from the report reveals almost non-existence of extreme poverty in the outer suburbs in the greater Toronto Area, which is now home to the missing middle class from Toronto.

The City of Toronto's housing stock is in fact more conducive for smaller-sized households. Unlike the recent immigrants from South Asia, who have larger-sized families, former immigrants and their descendants from Western and Eastern Europe have small-sized families, which could be accommodated with ease in the available housing stock in the City of Toronto. 

So what about the immigrants who stay behind? The answer lies in the availability of social services, e.g., shelters for homeless, subsidized housing and other similar facilities, which are more prevalent in Toronto than they are in the outer suburbs. It would make sense for households that rely on state's assistance to stay in Toronto to avail readily available social services.

Thus, Toronto's inner suburbs are now acting as the staging grounds or intermediate neighbourhoods for the new immigrants who save enough while living their to buy a home in the outer suburbs and eventually relocating their to start a new suburban life as the missing middle class of Toronto.

While the University of Toronto's study does not explain if the income polarization is causing further harm by limiting or preventing access to health-care, education, or the like for the low income households, it is still a very important contribution to the on-going debate on how to create  a socially just and egalitarian society.

Shrinking middle class makes Toronto a city of socioeconomic extremes - The Globe and Mail

The return of the non-creative class: wealthy suburbs

The recent release of census data in the United States shows that suburban communities in Virginia lead the United States in wealth generation.  At the same time, the highest incidence of poverty was concentrated in American Indian reservations in South Dakota.

The above findings regarding suburban communities should be of interest to urban planners who often believe the suburbs to be undesirable landscapes inhabited by obese and lifeless individuals, whose lives are soon to be buried under the unsustainable mortgage debt.  Not only the latest data show an increase in wealth in the suburban communities, but also a concentration of highly educated individuals.  According to the data, seven counties out of a total of 17 where more than 50% of the adults possessed a a bachelors degree were located in suburban communities.

The data from the American Community Survey also revealed that immigrant populations are fast spreading in the United States into communities where they had not set foot in the past.  The immigrants have started to move into suburban and rural communities whereas in the past, immigrants concentrated primarily in urban communities.

--

From the New York Times,

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF

WASHINGTON — The three places in the country with the highest median household income are all in Virginia, according to census datareleased on Tuesday, while those with the highest rates of poverty are in four American Indian reservations, all in South Dakota.

The Virginia counties of Fairfax and Loudoun and the city of Falls Church had the highest median income, according to the data, which spans 2005 to 2009. Falls Church was the highest at $113,313, up by 17 percent from 2000. The lowest median income was in Owsley County, Ky., at $18,869.

Of the five counties with poverty rates higher than 39 percent, four contain or are in American Indian reservations in South Dakota. The fifth, Willacy County, Tex., is on the Gulf Coast.

The data is from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which samples 1 in 10 Americans on a variety of social, economic and demographic topics. It is the single largest release of data in the bureau’s history, with 11 billion individual estimates covering 670,000 geographic locations. It gives details on the characteristics of American society based on surveys, and is separate from the 2010 Census, which will provide a precise count of all Americans.

In another finding, the immigrant population has spread out to areas that previously had none. The number of immigrants increased by 40 percent in the nearly 2,500 counties where they had comprised less than 5 percent of the population in 2000. Immigrants have traditionally settled in cities, but in the last decade, they have followed jobs to rural and suburban areas, particularly ones with housing booms.

Among the sharpest increases were in Frederick County, Md., where the foreign-born population nearly tripled to almost 10 percent of the population. Other fast risers were Stafford County, Va., where the foreign-born population also tripled, and Newton County, Ga., where it jumped fourfold.

Meanwhile, the nation’s traditional immigrant centers — the 16 counties where immigrants made up more than 30 percent of the population, according to the data — saw their foreign-born population grow by only a quarter million.

The suburbs of Washington also contained the highest concentration of people with higher education. Seven of the 17 counties where more than half of people 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree were in the city’s suburbs. Three counties were in Colorado (Boulder, Douglas and Pitkin) and two were in California (Marin and San Francisco) and Maryland (Howard and Montgomery).

There were 62 counties where less than 10 percent of the adult population had a bachelor’s degree. Fourteen of these counties were in Georgia, nine in Tennessee, eight in Kentucky and five each in Florida and West Virginia.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Washington, and Robert Gebeloff from New York.

Wage differentials

The Economist magazine produced an illustrative graph showing the difference in income of the rulers and those who are ruled. It appears that the worst offender is Kenya where the leader’s annual income is 240-times that of  per capita GDP. Singapore, Indonesia, and South Africa follow Kenya in the widening gap between the rulers and the masses.