Bangladeshi Americans

Bengali Immigrants to the United States

Most Bangladeshi immigration to the United States is even more recent than that, increasing in the 1990s; in New York, for instance, the Bangladeshi population rose from about 5,000 in 1990 (half of the Bangladeshi American population) to 28,269 in 2000. The U.S. Census Bureau announced in 2007 that there were 143,619 Bangladeshi Americans, which represents 0.065 percent of the American population. While early immigrants were motivated by escaping the political turmoil of newly independent Bangladesh, more recent immigrants have been motivated principally by the country's employment opportunities. Most are under 40, and about half of immigrating adults are married.

Nearly all Bangladeshi Americans are Bengali (though not all Bengali Americans are Bangladeshi Americans) and include Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist Bangladeshis. The Bengali language is one of the world's major languages, with over 200 million native speakers and its own script.

The first Bengali immigrants to the United States arrived in the early 1900s and worked as lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest and railway workers in California. There numbers were small because of the discriminatory immigration quotas in place at the time. A small number of Bengali and Indian immigrants were able to challenge those quotas on the grounds that modern [Page 313]anthropology considered them Caucasian, but this loophole was eliminated in 1924, and Bengalis living in the United States had restricted citizenship rights until 1946.

Around the 1940s, Bengali immigrants began to settle in New York City and San Francisco; these were often merchant sailors who had abandoned their ships. The largest Bangladeshi population is found in the New York City area, though at the dawn of the 21st century a sizable percentage of the New York Bangladeshi population relocated to the thriving Muslim American community in the Detroit metropolitan area. A similarly large population is in Paterson, New Jersey, and the Dallas, Texas, Bangladeshi population is larger, proportionally, than New York's. The Dallas community founded the Texas Bangladesh Association in 1997, with 500 members. In recent years, the Bangladeshi community has been dispersing from its traditional metropolitan centers; from 1990 to 2000, for instance, the Bangladeshi population in Georgia grew from 135 to 1,283, mostly as a result of migration from other states.

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