iNDICA NEWS BUREAU
Asian Americans are the only major racial or ethnic group in the United States that is majority immigrant. Overall, 64% of Asian adults say they have given to a charitable organization in the US in the last 12 months, according to a new analysis of a multilingual, nationally representative survey of 7,006 Asian American adults conducted July 5, 2022, through Jan. 27, 2023, the Pew Research Center said in a recent report.
About a third of Indian American adults (31%) and about a quarter of Vietnamese American adults (24%) say they have given to a charity in their Asian origin country. One-in-ten Chinese adults and 6% of Japanese adults say the same.
Meanwhile, 20% of Asian adults in the US say they have given to a charity located in their Asian country of origin in the 12 months before the survey. And 27% say they have sent money to someone living there – personal financial transfers known as remittances.
Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese adults in the US are more likely than other Asian origin groups to say they have sent remittances in the 12 months before the survey. Chinese and Japanese adults in the US are among the least likely to say so.
Among the six largest Asian origin groups in the US, Filipino (42%), Indian (36%) and Vietnamese (33%) adults are the most likely to say they have sent money to anyone living in their ancestral homeland. Chinese (10%) and Japanese (3%) adults are the least likely to say this.
Indian and Filipino adults are more likely to say they sent remittances for ordinary expenses, health expenses or a large purchase than Korean adults, the report said. Seventy two percent of Filipino, 61 percent of Indian and 61 percent of Vietnamese adults say they sent money for ordinary expenses compared with 28 percent of Korean adults.
The US is by far the world’s largest remittance-sending nation, in part because it also has the largest immigrant population of any country. In 2021, Asian Americans’ places of origin collectively received about $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. The Asian countries that are the largest receivers of US remittances broadly coincide with the most common origin countries for Asian Americans – India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan. These six countries received about $55 billion from the U.S. in 2021.
India, the Philippines and China were also among the five largest receivers of US remittances globally in 2021. Each country received over $10 billion in remittances from the US that year.
