Asians fastest-growing race in United States, census finds

WASHINGTON—Asians are the fastest growing race group in the United States, reflecting a surge in immigration from the entire region over a decade, the US Census Bureau said Wednesday.

As part of an ongoing analysis of the data it reaped from its 2010 census, the federal agency said those who identified themselves as Asian alone, and not mixed race, grew by 43.3 percent from a decade earlier.

That was more than four times faster than the rate of growth for the overall US population, which grew 9.7 percent in the same period to 308,745,538.

Some 14.7 million people, or 4.8 percent of the total population, identified themselves as Asian alone. Another 2.6 million, or 0.9 percent, said they were Asian in combination with another race group, most commonly white.

“Net international migration is the biggest component of the change in the Asian population,” Elizabeth Hoeffel, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s population division, told reporters in a conference call.

For statistical purposes, the United States defines an Asian as someone “having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.”

Those who identified themselves as either Asian alone or Asian mixed with another race grew by at least 30 percent in all states except Hawaii, where they already made up a majority of the population.

States with the fastest rate of Asian growth were Nevada (116 percent), Arizona (95 percent) and North Carolina (85 percent).

New York had the biggest Asian population with 1.1 million, followed by Los Angeles (484,000) and San Jose, California (327,000).

Chinese was the largest of all Asian groups (four million, including 700,000 who identified as mixed race), followed by Filipinos (3.4 million) and Asian Indians (3.2 million).