Today’s NYT contains a useful graphical tool for displaying census data. The data being used is nothing new - it’s all census 2000 data — but the graphical display reveals patterns that you don’t notice in a table. The image below shows where immigrants from India are, with larger circles denoting the larger population clusters. (I focus on Indians because they’re the only South Asian group that this tool lets you explore)

The largest circles show populations of 50,000 or more. You can find them in Santa Clara county (just south of San Francisco), Cook County (around Chicago) and Queens, NY. Of course, the San Francisco and NYC clusters contain other large populations of Indians in adjacent counties, with a disontinuous mega cluster of Indians in the Boston to DC corridor.

It’s also interesting to see how few Indians there are in other parts of the USA. The very smallest dots on the map, the ones the size of flyspecs, those show populations of fewer than one hundred Indians, such as the 88 Indians in Jasper, MO. Basically, if you can’t see brown on this map, there weren’t Indians worth mentioning back in 2000.

It’s worth clicking on the image and going to the tool itself, since that graphic gives you information about the size of each of the clusters when you hover over any point. This is just a screen capture to show you where the IBDs are.