By Elsa Maxey
A recent Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research report relating to a survey about the area’s community reaches some interesting conclusions backed up by 2010 census data — Fort Bend is the most ethnically diverse in the nation. This is supported by percentages showing its 585,375 population to have 19 percent Asians, 24 percent Latino, 21 percent African American, and 36 percent Anglos. Based on the findings, that means Fort Bend is “coming closer than any other county in the United States to having an equal division among the nation’s four major ethnic communities.”
Also, according to the report, the area shows a transformation of the local community with a growing number of Asians. Sugar Land, the largest city in Fort Bend County, was 37 percent Asian in 2010, a far cry from the 6.5 percent in 1990 in all of Fort Bend County. Who are they? What comprises this growing group of Asians is not all that clear to many people. These are Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese and others of Asian descent.
With respect to the group specifics, there are 106,263 Asians in Fort Bend split among Indians and Pakistanis as the largest group comprising 31 percent, Chinese and Taiwanese account for 21 percent, and Vietnamese are 15 percent of the Asians in Fort Bend proper.
According to the reported information, the Houston region (including Fort Bend) as a whole is the most ethnically and culturally diverse large metropolitan area in the country. This is considered to be at the forefront of the new diversity reconstructing the social and political landscape across the urban U.S. communities. The findings report is entitled “Houston Area Asian Survey: Diversity and Transformation among Asians in Houston.”