Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf
Yup, it's mainly due to the differences in immigration policy.
I think the backlog to apply for a green card as an Indian is something like 10-15 years, whereas Canada's points system doesn't impose caps on the basis of national origin. So the only way to come to the US is to come on a work visa (like H1B) and transition to a green card. This means that the Indians coming to the US have to be well educated and must be able to hold on to a job that typically requires a degree. Indian Americans are among the highest income earning ethnic groups on a per capita and median basis in the US. Comparatively, South Asians are more likely to be poor and to a limited extent more likely to be involved in things like crime in Canada and the UK.
Also, Canada accepted a considerable number of refugees during the Khalistan crisis in India and the Civil War in Sri Lanka, which help account for the large number of Punjabi Sikhs and Sri Lankan Tamils who have been in Canada now for a couple / few generations now.
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Well, it's the US that's the outlier here.
In almost all the other South Asian diasporas, not just the richer western ones like the UK, Canada and Australia, you have comparatively way more people who were descendants of manual laborers, but even the Gulf countries and older diasporas like South Africa, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Mauritius etc.
I think the history of manual labor among Asians more broadly is underestimated and underrepresented in the North American imagination, which assumes Asians only do "bookish" things rather than do physical labor or work with their hands.
But Asian immigrants (Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc.) were railway workers, lascars and sailors, farmers, lumber mill workers and miners in western North America, British Columbia and California, Hawaii etc. long before they were stereotyped as affluent doctors, engineers and tech workers.