They are the only major U.S. racial or ethnic group in the country that is majority immigrant, Pew Research found and now the organization says survey data shows that most Asian Americans say they have given to U.S. charities. Pew says Asian adults are more likely to say they have given to charity in the U.S. than in their Asian ancestral homeland, at 64% for U.S. charitable giving, and 20% giving to their Asian country of origin.
Pew said the organization wanted to better understand how family and personal connections in Asian American communities come into play with the connections they have to their ancestral homeland, and how philanthropic sentiment ties in.
Immigrants made up 54% of all Asian Americans and 67% of Asian American adults in 2022, Pew Research found in an analysis released after surveying members of Asian American communities, and 54% of Asian adults said they have immediate family members who still live in their Asian country of origin.
Pew found that among Asian adults who were born in the United States or immigrated to the U.S., most say they have given to a U.S. charitable organization. Within that demographic group, it is Filipino, Indian and Vietnamese adults in the U.S. who are more likely than other Asian-origin groups to say they have sent remittance money back home in the 12 months before they were surveyed, Pew found. The data showed that Chinese and Japanese adults were the least likely to say they had sent remittance money back home.
Among Asian Americans who said they sent remittance money back home in the 12 months before the survey, the most common reason, at 63%, was to help family members with common daily expenses, with 50% reporting they sent money to help family with health care costs.
Pew’s data found that in 2021 Asian Americans’ countries of origin collectively received around $63 billion in remittance money sent from their relatives in the United States, and countries among the largest recipients of remittance money included the Philippines, China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and India. These countries are also the six most common origin countries for Asian Americans, Pew found. World Bank Data found that these six countries received about $55 billion of the $63 billion in remittance money, Pew reported.