Indian doctors and engineers are settling in the Midwestern city's suburbs, helping offset decades of population decline.
In suburban St. Louis, Pradeep Ramakrishnan watches Hindi movies at the mall and prays to Shiva at a Hindu temple near his home.
He lives in Ballwin, a wealthy suburb in west St. Louis County, just over 20 miles from the Ferguson neighborhoods that have attracted national attention this summer. Unlike Ferguson and other predominantly black suburbs north of the city, Ballwin is one of the mostly white communities to the west. This is where a growing number of Indian families and other white-collar immigrants are settling as they find work in the region's emerging biotech and health care industries. They feel more welcome here than many African Americans do.
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"Everyone has been very friendly," says Ramakrishnan, 49, an IT manager who lives in a six-bedroom house with his wife and teenage son. "I've never had a problem."
The Indian community in St. Louis County grew 81 percent from 2000 to 2012, according to census data. They are now the largest immigrant group in the county, followed by those from China, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mexico. As a group, the region's immigrants are wealthier and more educated than most Americans and immigrants in other parts of the United States. About half of them have college degrees, census data shows, compared with 29 percent of all native-born Americans and 28 percent of all immigrants.
Ramakrishnan, who was born in Mumbai, received two master's degrees from Illinois State University before moving to St. Louis 21 years ago for an IT job at a tech startup. Back then, he could only find a handful of Indian restaurants. Now he has more than 100 options. So he can eat paneer tikka masala and watch a Cardinals baseball game in the same day.
"It's the best of both worlds," says Ramakrishnan, who is now a naturalized American citizen.
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Yet St. Louis is hardly an immigrant destination. Foreigners make up only 4 percent of the population, a small number compared with other large metro areas. Immigrants account for 17 percent of the Chicago metro area.