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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating article. One part in particular answered a question I've had about Houston for ages:

I visited Houston with a friend about a decade ago and we were both puzzled about the Chinatown area of the city. Why, we asked, would a city smack in the middle of the country have such a large Chinese population? NYC & California made sense, but Texas?

And as it turns out:

"Rain and his companions walked for a full day and most of the night, until, before dawn, they came to a road, where an associate of the smugglers picked them up. They went to Houston first, and from there a van took them straight to New York."

Waystation city on the international Chinese immigrants smuggling route for folks who just crossed the Mexican border. Fascinating.

EDIT: Aaaaaaand I'm wrong. Thank you shiftpgdn for the Wikipedia link and background.

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That's not the real reason at all. First Houston is major port city, the fourth largest city in the country, the most diverse in the country and it's certainly not "smack in the middle of the country." Houston has two China towns. The east downtown China Town area was established in the 50s-70s but later abandoned due to white(yellow?) flight as the new Chinatown area expanded in the west of the city in the 1980s. This was also fed by Vietnamese "boat-people" who were typically of Chinese descent.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_American...

Even more fascinating. Thanks for the correction and link.

I'm curious as to your source or why you say, in no uncertain terms, that Houston is "the most diverse in the country". If such a thing could be accurately quantified, I would bet my life savings on NYC.

Here's the study that's commonly cited in reference to Houston's diversity: http://kinder.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/Urban_Research_Center/M...

And the relevant paragraph regarding NYC: The standardized Entropy Index measures how close a total population is to sharing balanced percentages across its racial/ethnic groups. If one subgroup is 100 percent of the population, then the standardized index score will be 0. If the four racial/ethnic groups are each 25 percent of the population the score would be one. Houston has the highest entropy score of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, 0.874. New York is a close second with a score of 0.872. All but two of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, Boston and Philadelphia, have a higher entropy score than the national average of 0.709, meaning that in general the large metropolitan areas are more diverse than the nation as a whole.

EDIT: I'm not going to argue the pros or cons of the methodology because I'm not familiar with the field of study.

Ah, interesting way to qualitatively determine diversity. Taking the quoted example, from my perspective a city with 100 ethnic groups, each with 1%, is much more diverse than the example with 4, each with 25% - but they share the same entropy index of 1. Do I have that right?

It's the Theil index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theil_index

I am not an expert in its use, but IMHO, it's BS because it's dependent on the idea that you have maximum diversity if various subgroups are all the same size, but it's very dependent on the definition of subgroups. For example, in the case of ethnic diversity, the measure will vary significantly depending on whether you group people from Southeast Asia and people from the Indian subcontinent together as "Asian" or not, or any other subjective subdivision.

It might have use as a comparative measure with a predetermined set of classification groups, but you can definitely manipulate your conditions to construct different outcomes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Houston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

I would go with NYC also, but its not too far off.

That's not necessarily the reason for Houston having such a large Chinese community. The majority of Chinese in Houston are legal and often more educated immigrants that would not have gone through Mexico.

The people profiled in the article were from specific poor areas in China (eg Fujian) that could be considered the Chinese equivalent of Appalachia.

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