Stats on U.S. Ethnic Groups

Here are some interesting statistics from Michael Barone's book The New Americans, which contrasts the experiences of past Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants with those of modern Blacks, Hispanics and Asians (respectively). The stats are quoted from a review of the book at FrontPage Magazine.

• By 1990 Italian-Americans earned income 17 percent above the national average and were 50 percent more likely to have college degrees.
• ...during the Al Capone era in Chicago, only 30 percent of those in organized crime were Italian-Americans, while 29 percent were Irish-Americans and 20 percent were Jewish.
• By 1937, Jews were 25 percent of the population of New York City — but 65 percent of lawyers, 64 percent of dentists, and 55 percent of physicians in the city were Jews.
• ...Jewish-Americans who were 4 percent of the U.S. population in the 1930s have declined to only 2 percent today. Intermarriage with non-Jews characterized 50 percent of their marriages during the 1990s, with only 28 percent of children from such marriages being raised as Jews and only 20 percent getting Jewish religious education.
• By 1960 more than 75 percent of Jewish-Americans voted Democratic or even farther to the Left.
• By 1995, Asian-Americans were 4 percent of America's population but 14 percent of all those scoring 700+ on the verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test and 28 percent of those scoring 750+ on the math portion of the SAT.
• Today Asian-Americans are 19 percent of all students at Harvard, 28 percent at MIT, 22 percent at Stanford, 39 percent at Berkeley, 38 percent at UCLA, and 10 percent at the University of Michigan.