How the Automobile Changed Hyphenated America

While most of the stories on immigration in the burbs this year have focused, like the debate in Congress, on illegal immigrant laborers, the Associated Press taps into the other way the suburbs are growing more diverse: highly educated middle-class immigrants from India and other south Asian countries. Long Island, N.Y.'s Newsday ran the AP tale of Indian tech workers clustered around Albany and other upstate New York cities. Like any suburban transplants, they pass up city life for better schools and more space. Like other immigrants they come to suburbs because that's where the jobs are. Like previous generations of self-exiles, they try to preserve their culture, but not always, as with urban immigrants, by living in enclaves. Dish-TV allows the Tamil family in the AP story to keep up with home news, while the automobile allows the south Asian community to spread itself across the entirety of New England: the Albany Hindu temple's 130 worshippers include some who drive from as far away as Burlington, Vt.