Indian Americans & Assimilation Into American Culture

This paper will focus on Indian Americans and their assimilation in to the United States and its culture. Being a second-generation Indian American, I believe that I can relate to this subject well. I and other second-generation Indians Americans face a unique set of entirely different social issues. I will focus on the main social institutions of family, education, religion, politics, and compare and contrast the experiences of first generation Indian Americans and second generation Indian Americans. It is a generally known and proven fact that first generation Indians who immigrate to the United States, come in at a higher level of education than other immigrant groups. They already are working professionals or seeking post-baccalaureate degrees. The image of Indians in the United States is generally that they are highly educated, respectable professionals with generally smart children. Indian Americans as a community have the lowest crime rate and the highest earnings, causing them to be dubbed the country 's "model minority" in a national survey (Portes, 1996). Allow me to provide some background information on my family and their immigration history, to give the reader a better understanding of my perspective. My maternal grandfather came to this country in 1965, seeking to earn is Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This opened the door for my parents to come to the United States in 1983. Being born in India, I was at the age of 1 when my parents immigrated, so I was pretty much raised here in the United States. Presently, a large portion of my family has immigrated to the United States. As a result of the 1965 Emigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas, large numbers of immigrants from Asia entered America. It was then that Indian Americans became a rapidly expanding ethnic group in the US. This new population of immigrants which had high levels of education, were fluent in English, and educated in distinctly

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