This is about the 1983409258094th time I have to remind you about Vivek Bald's book about Bengali Harlem. There were more than 10k but they would be counting themselves as Black or Latin by that point.
Do you think the fraction identifying as Bengali has changed? So the 10k to 600k number doesn't reflect actual growth?
Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&ti....
For the 600,000 figure to be accurate, there must have been hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis already here in 1989 who started identifying as Bangladeshi since then. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But those figures are shocking for a country that provides the U.S. with a very small number of skilled immigrants.
You might enjoy Fatima Shaik's books as well (although her forebears were from what is now W. Bengal - which serves to draw out my point - they came like my ancestors before Partition and before 1971, so some were not even aware of what happened or that they were Bengali-descended as opposed to "East Indian" without some research). Remember Bengal and Orissa were joined at a certain point and Bengal was divided at least once before so things were in flux well before 1947.
Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&ti....
For the 600,000 figure to be accurate, there must have been hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis already here in 1989 who started identifying as Bangladeshi since then. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But those figures are shocking for a country that provides the U.S. with a very small number of skilled immigrants.