Some are ‘crazy rich,’ but Asians’ inequality is widest in the U.S.
The leads of the new romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” are precisely what you might expect, based on the title: picture-perfect images of the immigrant success story. Viewers might even get the impression from watching the film that every Asian lives a charmed life.
Nick Young (played by Henry Golding) and Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) are young, high-achieving professors at New York University. Nick is the scion of a spectacularly wealthy family from Singapore, while Rachel shared a hardscrabble life with her mother, a Chinese immigrant, before becoming a star economist.
But that is not a full picture of the Asian-american experience. They are now the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the country, displacing African-americans, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data that shows income inequality among Asian-americans has nearly doubled from 1970 to 2016.
And in the city that Nick and Rachel call home? Asians in New York are the poorest immigrant group. The number of Asians living in poverty grew by 44 percent over about a decade and a half, to more than 245,000 in 2016, from 170,000 in 2000, according to the Asian American Federation.
While rich Asians have become the highest-earning group in the nation, income growth among poor Asians has largely stagnated. This trend mirrors that of other racial groups, though income inequality has accelerated fastest among Asians.
By 2016, Asians in the top 10th of income distribution earned about $120,000 more than those in the bottom 10th. Disparities among Asian-americans are primarily driven by the different levels of education, skills and English-language proficiency