January 16, 2008	Wednesday	Muharram 06, 1429

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 15: Most Pakistani-Americans fear that political chaos, crackdown on opposition and Benazir Bhutto’s assassination have deepened the negative perceptions of a community already under siege from the fallout of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, according to a survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times.

Ms Bhutto’s assassination has furthered perceptions of Pakistan as a nation dominated by extremists, LA Times said.

Anam Syed, a 21-year-old UC Riverside student, told LA Times that there was widespread ignorance about Pakistan among some Americans who erroneously believe it is a militant, Arabic-speaking Mideast country.

Hasan Shirazi, a Los Angeles banker, said it was bad enough a few years ago when he went to volunteer in a Compton elementary school classroom and asked the students what they knew about Pakistan. He was startled when one student responded: “That’s where Osama bin Laden is living.” And now the situation has deepened this perception, Shirazi said.

A 2005 demographic profile by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles paints California’s Pakistani-American community as a relatively small, but highly educated middle class. The study, based on the 2000 Census, found that Californians of Pakistani descent numbered about 28,000, double the population of 1990. Community members say the figure now surpasses 40,000.

The data showed that 56 per cent had undergraduate or graduate degrees, the second-highest rate after Indian-Americans among 16 Asian subgroups examined. Nearly half were home-owners, with the median household income about $49,000, on par with the state-wide average. Two-thirds were immigrants, with a 46 per cent naturalisation rate, and the majority were fluent English speakers.

According to Manan Ahmed, a University of Chicago doctoral candidate in the history of Islam and South Asia, the first wave of Pakistani immigrants to the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s were highly educated professionals. His father, an engineer, was among them. The 1980s and early 1990s saw a second group of less educated immigrants -- taxi drivers, restaurant workers and blue-collar labourers. Many of them settled on the East Coast, gaining entry through programmes like the US diversity lottery, which awards visa to nations with relatively low rates of immigration, Ahmed said.

In the mid to late 1990s, Ahmed said, a surge of immigrants began heading for Silicon Valley to work in high-tech industries.

But the immigrant population has fallen since 9/11. Some people were deported for violating immigration rules during FBI’s special registration of men from Pakistan and other predominantly Muslim nations. Some left on their own. Meanwhile, the US government significantly reduced the number of visas for new entrants from Pakistan.

According to the US government data, the number of visas issued to workers and other non-immigrant temporary visitors from Pakistan declined by more than half, from 89,000 in 2000 to 39,000 in 2006. Student visas declined by about half, and the Institute of International Educa-tion reported this year that the Pakistani student population fell from 8,644 in 2001 to 5,401 in 2006.

The number of immigrant visas issued also dropped, from 10,256 in 2000 to 7,675 in 2006. And Pakistan was deemed ineligible for diversity visas in 2002.

Hamid Khan, executive director of the South Asian Network, said his community service organisation had fielded a sharp rise in complaints of hate crimes and job and housing discrimination since 9/11.