America Counts: Stories Behind the Numbers
Tribal Casinos: An Economic Boon
American Indians on tribal lands in the United States have historically faced some of the nation’s worst economic conditions.
The proportion of American Indian people living below the poverty line in 1989 was 31%, considerably higher than the 13% national poverty rate at the time.
The expansion of tribal casinos that began in the 1990s helped improve economic conditions faster for American Indians relative to the U.S. population as a whole, according to joint U.S. Census Bureau and university research, though there is still progress to be made: the American Indian poverty rate was 19.6% in 2024, greater than that year’s national average of 12.1%, according to Census Bureau data.
A working paper, written by Maggie R. Jones (Census Bureau), Randall Akee (Census Bureau and University of California Los Angeles) and Emilia Simeonova (Johns Hopkins University) used census data to evaluate the ZIP-code-level economic impact of tribal casinos on nearby people and places.
After Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) in 1988, the number of U.S. census tracts with an American Indian tribal casino operation surged from near zero in 1989 to nearly 600 by 2019.
Continue reading to learn more about the economic impact of tribal casinos in the U.S.
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