Introduction

The goal of this project is to identify five different ethnic immigrant groups and focus on their immigrant demographics and their role in the American workforce. This is a team project and there are five members on the team so each of us picked an ethnic group to focus on and research. Each member of the team is also required to meet with a Human Resource Department and discuss the overall importance of diversity in their organization with an emphasis on the ethnic group they had chosen to research. We discussed with these Human Resource departments the importance of diversity in their organization as well as the accommodations they make for diversity, and the contribution these diverse employees make to their organization. The team then looked at the concept of the American Dream and how it is perceived by the different ethnicities within the literature we have read in this course, when possible. We then took a look at all the information provided be each team member and began to find many commonalities between all our research. It seems all the companies researched and their respective Human Resource Departments had similar goals in regards to Diversity in the Workplace. The ethnic groups researched all had a similar American Dream and their roles in the American workforce provided some similarities and differences. Overall, this project allowed us to focus one particular ethnicity and then compare and contrast our findings as a group.


Group Ethnics - East Indian

With more than 2.15 million peoples in America, perhaps one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States is East Indians. In the period of 1990-1999, the overall growth rate for East Indians in America was 105.87%, which is extremely high considering that the average growth rate for the whole USA is 7.6% (Embassy of India, 2009). Since that time, the growth rate has increased substantially, rowing to 421,006 in the 2000-2006 periods from 352,278 between 1990 and 1996, making America the second most East Indian populated country on earth (Embassy of India, 2009).



Of those in America, more than 85% of them have completed High School and 62% have some college level education. This, of course, makes for high numbers of East Indians in the American workforce, with 72.3% of East Indians actively working, while 57.7% of those employed hold managerial and professional jobs (Embassy of India, 2009). These people have fully taken advantage of the American dream, making many contributions to the American workforce while providing for themselves quite well while doing so. East Indians in America even tend to make approximately $20,000 more per year than the national average (Embassy of India, 2009).

At EB Games, the Human Resources department is very familiar with East Indian employees and their contributions to EB’s workplace. While they do not keep specific statistics about ethnic heritage, the Director of Human Resources was able to confirm that they hire many East Indians in all areas of their company (personal communication, June 3, 2009). There are about a dozen Indians working in their head office, which is made up of only about fifty employees as it is. In their distribution centre, the majority of employees are East Indian, mostly women, and their stores have a fair number of East Indians working in them as well. For the most part, these employees tend to prove themselves very well to EB Games, as they tend to have a strong work ethic and contribute as well as any of their co-workers, if not better. There have never been any serious problems with East Indian employees working with people of a different race at EB Games (J. Tadier, personal communication, June 3, 2009).

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