Indian-Americans face unfair police stops in US: Survey

New York, December 6

Indian-Americans say that they have faced discrimination in many areas in their daily lives in the US, according to a new survey about Asian-Americans.

The report released this week is part of a series titled "Discrimination in America" which is based on a survey conducted for National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health.

About 1 in 10 Asian-Americans report that they or a family member have been unfairly stopped or treated by the police because they are Asian. But on the basis of the ethnicity, Indian-Americans reported unfair police stops or treatment eight times more often than Chinese-Americans, it said.

Indian-Americans were significantly more likely (17 per cent) than Chinese Americans (2 per cent) to say they or a family member had been unfairly stopped or treated by the police because they were Asian, the results of the survey showed.

"Our poll shows that Asian American families have the highest average income among the groups we have surveyed, and yet the poll still finds that Asian-Americans experience persistent discrimination in housing, jobs, and at college," said Robert Blendon, Professor at Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health who co-directed the survey.

"Over the course of our series, we are seeing again and again that income is not a shield from discrimination," Blendon said.

According to immigration status, the survey said non-immigrant Asian-Americans are more than three times as likely to say they have experienced violence because they are Asian and more than twice as likely to say they have been threatened or non-sexually harassed because they are Asian.

Non-immigrant Asian Americans are significantly more likely than immigrant Asian Americans to say they have experienced these forms of discrimination, the findings said.

A quarter or more of Asian Americans in the survey said they experienced anti-Asian discrimination in employment and when seeking housing.

The survey was conducted between January 26 and April 9, 2017, among a nationally representative sample of 3,453 adults aged 18 or older. — PTI