How ‘Crazy Rich’ Asians Have Led to the Largest Income Gap in the U.S.

The leads of the new romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” are precisely what you might expect, based on the title: picture-perfect images of the immigrant success story. Viewers might even get the impression from watching the film that every Asian lives a charmed life.

Nick Young (played by Henry Golding) and Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) are young, high-achieving professors at New York University. Nick is the scion of a spectacularly wealthy family from Singapore, while Rachel shared a hardscrabble life with her mother, a Chinese immigrant, before becoming a star economist.

But that is not a full picture of the Asian-American experience. Asian-Americans are now the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the country, displacing African-Americans, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of United States Census Bureau data. The chart below shows that income inequality among Asian-Americans has nearly doubled from 1970 to 2016.

And in the city that Nick and Rachel call home? Asians in New York are the poorest immigrant group. The number of Asians living in poverty grew by 44 percent over about a decade and a half, to more than 245,000 in 2016, from 170,000 in 2000, according to the Asian American Federation.

While rich Asians have become the highest-earning group in the nation, income growth among poor Asians has largely stagnated. This trend mirrors that of other racial groups, though income inequality has accelerated fastest among Asians.

By 2016, Asians in the top 10th of income distribution earned about $120,000 more than those in the bottom 10th. Disparities among Asian-Americans are primarily driven by the different levels of education, skills and English-language proficiency among the many groups that make up the diaspora. People from India and China have higher incomes than those from Southeast Asia because they have higher levels of education on average.

For example, three-fourths of Taiwanese and Indians in America have a bachelor’s degree or higher, said Jennifer Lee, a professor of sociology at Columbia University. Southeast Asian groups from countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, however, lag well behind the average for other Asian-Americans.

Jonathan Lee, 30, a Chinese-American who lives in New York and works as a senior designer at Etsy, and his sister, Jessica, are both college graduates, unlike their parents. “My father told us stories of sleeping on an ironing board at his father’s laundromat,” Mr. Lee said. “My mother came here when she was 19 and took night classes at F.I.T. to become a pattern maker. My father spent his career at ConEd. Now they own a home.”

Asian immigrants make up a less monolithic group than they once did. In 1970, Asian immigrants came mostly from East Asia, but South Asian immigrants are fueling the growth that makes Asian-Americans the fastest-expanding group in the country, said Dr. Lee, the Columbia University sociologist.

Asian-Americans, who accounted for less than 1 percent of the population in 1970, are up to 6 percent today. South Asians and Southeast Asians together now outnumber East Asians. Family-sponsored migration remains the largest source of Asian immigration.

Inequality is elastic, of course, adjusting over time because of fluctuating waves of immigration, as seen among the 10 most populous Asian immigrant groups in the United States.

The disparity in income is in part caused by the gap between immigrants who arrived on skills-based visas and those who did not. “Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, they’re primarily refugee populations,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, director of AAPI Data, which publishes demographic data and policy research on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The difference becomes even more pronounced over time. “Existing immigrant Indians and Chinese are highly educated, and then they recruit their highly skilled relatives,” Mr. Ramakrishnan said. “Family visas tend to go to highly educated people.” So when President Trump and his Republican allies call for an end to family-based immigration, they’re asking to keep the best and the brightest out, he said.

English-language proficiency is also crucial to income, education, and access to health care. At the same time, even some highly educated immigrants may experience language barriers. About 35 percent of Asians have limited English proficiency, Dr. Lee said.

An article in The New York Times more than 50 years ago referred to the growing success of Japanese-Americans within a generation of their World War II internment, helping to solidify the image of Asian-Americans as a so-called model minority. But many Asian-Americans resist that characterization, saying it is false and dangerous, helping to mask bigger issues among an especially wide diaspora. “Crazy Rich Asians” will only reinforce the myth.

With income growth skewing to the top from 1970 to 2016, it’s true that there are more very rich Asians. While a majority of Asian-Americans have a higher standard of living than other ethnic groups, and while whites and Asians outearn African-Americans and Latinos at all rungs of the income ladder, Asian-American poverty is also increasing.

The trend is occurring in the largest American cities, with their historic Chinatowns, and in newer ethnic centers, like Ramsey County, Minn., which has many Hmong families living in or near poverty.

“I watched my parents struggle to make ends — going to adult school to learn English, working factory jobs and cleaning homes to make ends meet,” said Bo Thao-Urabe, 45, of St. Paul, Minn., who came as a refugee from Laos in 1979, after extensive American bombing during the Vietnam War. “As kids we got up extra early to go dumpster diving for aluminum cans in those early years. In the summer months, we became farm laborers throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.”

Summers spent farming were also hard on Kay Moua, 23, of St. Paul, whose family is from Thailand. “I was really embarrassed to go back to school,” she said, “because I knew that once the other kids saw my dark skin, my sunburned face, my calloused hands, they would know: This is what it looks like to be a poor person.”

Throughout the country, there is little uniformity. The Chinese population in Boston and New York looks very different from that of suburban California. Slightly more than half of Asians (57 percent) have achieved the American dream of homeownership, Pew says. For the rest of the United States population, it’s 63 percent.

The release of “Crazy Rich Asians” and its all-Asian cast is an achievement that will leave many celebrating, as we witnessed at a screening this week. But demographers concerned about the difficulties that still face many Asian-Americans say the bright lights of Hollywood shouldn’t blind us to their challenges.