Community
– that’s all you need to know
BySumanGuhaMozumder
ore than a decade
ago when India’s
then Prime Minister
Inder Kumar Gujral
came on an official
visit to the United
States, he was given a warm
public reception by the Indian-
American community in Edison,
New Jersey.
More than 300-odd members
of the community from the Tri-
state area, including NewYork,
attended the reception in
September 1997, a day or two
after Gujral addressed the
United Nations General
Assembly in NewYork and also
met with then U.S. President Bill
Clinton.
But why choose New Jersey in
preference to NewYork where
Gujral had stayed and where
leaders from India have tradi-
tionally been hosted?
The answer came from an
Indian diplomat at the recep-
tion. “In the last couple of
years,” the diplomat said, “the
center of gravity seems to have
shifted from NewYork to New
Jersey, and so the selection of
New Jersey as the venue for the
reception,” the diplomat said,
alluding in a light vein to the
growing presence of a large
number of Indian-Americans
who had chosen the Garden
State as their home in prefer-
ence to NewYork.
Now, the U.S. Census Bureau
seems to confirm the trend that
started more than a decade ago
and continues till today.
According to a Census Bureau
report quoted by the Migration
Policy Institute, between 2009
and 2013, NewYork-Newark-
Jersey City area had the top con-
centrations of Indian-Americans
among 10 metropolitan areas in
the country.
That the number of foreign-
born people living in New Jersey
is growing is borne out by a
Census Bureau report that was
published by YouGov, an inter-
national market research
agency, and quoted last week by
NJ.Com. It said that New
Jersey's population continues to
inch towards nine million, driv-
en partly by the more than
50,000 immigrants who settle in
the state each year. Although it
did not give the break-up of
Indian-Americans in the new
settlement of immigrants, the
trend of Indians-Americans
choosing New Jersey as their
preferred home when coming to
the United States for the first
time, is believed to be continu-
ing more than in the past.
According to the Migration
Policy Institute, while the largest
population of Indian immi-
grants have settled in California
(19 percent), New Jersey comes
second with 11 percent, and
Texas a third with nine percent.
The top four counties with
Indian immigrants in the 2009-
13 period were Santa Clara
County in California, Middlesex
County in New Jersey, Cook
County in Illinois, and Alameda
County in California.
New Jersey’s Middlesex
County, the report said, has a
large Asian population — nearly
a quarter of the county's more
than 840,000 residents, and the
largest group is Asian-Indians.
Middlesex's Asian-Indian popu-
lation is reportedly the third-
largest in the nation, behind
Santa Clara, California, and
Queens, NewYork. Among oth-
ers, Census officials estimate
that last year alone, nearly
11,000 immigrants made
Hudson County their home,
helping boost its population to
nearly 675,000 and making it the
fastest-growing county in the
state, according to published
reports.
Ironically, immigrants’ prefer-
ence to make New Jersey their
home comes at a time when the
rest of America seems to dislike
the state the most.
In a report called ‘State of the
States', YouGov said last year
that New Jersey is the only state
in the country about which peo-
ple tend to have a negative
opinion, with 40 percent of the
Americans having an unfavor-
able opinion of the Garden
State.
So, why immigrants, especial-
ly those from India, tend to like
New Jersey more than other
Americans do.
Dr. Sudhanshu Prasad, a
medical doctor from India who
had been a member of the
Edison City Council, gave some
possible explanations “You see,
unlike many other American
States, New Jersey has a very
diverse population where you
can see an Indian walking side
by side a Korean, a Filipino or a
Chinese in a neighborhood, and
they all live in a spirit of good
neighborliness and bonhomie.
You won’t find that kind of a
bond among neighbors in many
other places in the U.S. That is
something great about New
Jersey,” Prasad who immigrated
some 33 years ago to the U.S. as
a young doctor, and settled in
Middlesex County, which he
calls his home, told Desi Talk.
“Even if I am given an option, I
will not leave New Jersey, espe-
cially Middlesex County,” he
said.
But that is not the only rea-
son why Indians prefer to live in
New Jersey. Many young people
who come here to work for IT
companies, either in NewYork,
or New Jersey find New Jersey a
very convenient place to live
because of its proximity to New
York.
The commute, even from a
place like Edison, or Princeton
to NewYork is very easy. Besides
some of the public schools,
especially in places like
Middlesex County are better
than many of their counterparts
in NewYork City, and good edu-
cation for their children is
something that Indian-
American parents care about
the most.
“But one of the interesting
things about our state, especial-
ly the Middlesex County, is that
it’s a very cosmopolitan place.
Look at the schools here.
Dozens of different languages
are spoken and the people are
open-minded and very accept-
ing here.
“I think people, who had left
India, can see something of an
India in miniature in New Jersey
because of its social environ-
ment where people from differ-
ent caste, creed and religion
freely live together. That is
something really great about
New Jersey despite its real or
perceived drawbacks,” Prasad
said.
M
New Jersey – A Home Away FromHome For Indian-Americans
M
any bloodlines
around the world,
particularly of south
Asian descent, may actually
be a bit more Denisovan — a
mysterious population of
hominids that lived around
the same time as the
Neanderthals – researchers
including Indian-origin sci-
entists have revealed.
The team from Harvard
Medical School and
University of California-Los
Angeles (UCLA) has created a
world map and also used
comparative genomics to
make predictions about
where Denisovan and
Neanderthal genes may be
impacting modern human
biology.
The analysis also proposes
that modern humans inter-
bred with Denisovans about
100 generations after their
trysts with the Neanderthals.
Denisovan genes can
potentially be linked to a
more subtle sense of smell in
Papua New Guineans and
high-altitude adaptions in
Tibetans.
Meanwhile, Neanderthal
genes found in people
around the world most likely
contribute to tougher skin
and hair.Most non-Africans
possess at least a little bit
Neanderthal DNA.
“There are certain classes
of genes that modern
humans inherited from the
archaic humans with whom
they interbred, which may
have helped the modern
humans to adapt to the new
environments in which they
arrived,” explained senior
author David Reich, geneti-
cist at Harvard Medical
School.
On the flip side, there was
negative selection to system-
atically remove ancestry that
may have been problematic
frommodern humans.
“We can document this
removal over the 40,000 years
since these admixtures
occurred,” Reich added.
Reich and lab members,
Swapan Mallick and Nick
Patterson, teamed up with
previous laboratory member
Sriram Sankararaman, assis-
tant professor of computer
science at the University of
California, Los Angeles for
the project.
They found evidence that
both Denisovan and
Neanderthal ancestry has
been lost from the X chromo-
some as well as genes
expressed in the male testes.
The team theorises that
this has contributed to
reduced fertility in males,
which is commonly observed
in other hybrids between two
highly divergent groups of
the same species.
The researchers collected
their data by comparing
known Neanderthal and
Denisovan gene sequences
across more than 250
genomes from 120 non-
African populations publicly
available through the Simons
Genome Diversity Project.
The analysis was carried
out by a machine-learning
algorithm that could differen-
tiate between components of
both kinds of ancestral DNA,
which are more similar to
one another than to modern
humans.
The study’s limitation is
that it relies on the current
library of ancient genomes
available. “We can’t use this
data to make claims about
what the Denisovans or
Neanderthals looked like,
what they ate, or what kind of
diseases they were suscepti-
ble to,” said Sankararaman,
first author on the paper. “We
are still very far from under-
standing that.”
The new map of archaic
ancestry was published in the
journal Current Biology.
– IANS
South Asians Share Ancestry With A
Mysterious Population, Researchers Say
11
News India Times
April 8, 2016
