South Asian Americans: A Comparative Dashboard

“South Asian American” gets used as if it names one community, but the census category lumps together five very different national-origin groups — Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and Nepali. The headline numbers, dominated by the much larger Indian-American population, end up flattening that diversity and feeding the “model minority” myth.

The dashboard below pulls together Pew Research Center’s 2021–2023 ACS analysis (released April 2025), the Carnegie Endowment’s Indian American Attitudes Survey, USCIS and DHS immigration data, KFF and ASPE health-coverage research, and AAPI Data’s benefits work — and lets you see what actually differs across the five groups. Demographics and migration pathways, economic outcomes, education and language, religion and civic identity, public benefits and health coverage, and a side-by-side reference table are split across the tabs at the top.

Sources are cited beneath each chart. Per-origin figures for Sri Lankan and Nepali Americans are sometimes derived from broader Asian-immigrant data — treat those as directional. The Bhutanese-American figures, where they appear, refer to a separate Census category of mostly Lhotshampa refugees of ethnic Nepali origin, not the “Nepali alone” group.