EDISON

DRIVE swiftly along Oak Tree Road, and it seems like a commonplace suburban boulevard lined with rows of stores of no distinctive character.

But slow down, and a clear identity comes into focus: Most of the stores are owned by someone with roots in India, including Patel’s Cash and Carry, Indus American Bank, Bengali Sweet House, and Saree Bazaar. In fact, the Exxon gas station is owned by an Indian and half of the eight screens at Movie City are showing films from Bollywood, not Hollywood.

Oak Tree Road, which runs through this sprawling town of 100,000 people and into neighboring Woodbridge Township, may be America’s liveliest Little India, with 400 Indian businesses that attract Indian immigrants from across the region. But the impact is more than just commercial. Indians make up from 20 to 25 percent of the population, and they have spearheaded the transformation of Edison — an overwhelmingly blue-collar and middle-class white community a generation ago — into a town with a decidedly Asian flavor.

Its mayor, Jun H. Choi, 36, is an M.I.T.-schooled Korean immigrant. One of its seven councilmen is from India, and there are hopes among Indian residents that another may be elected next year. According to the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey, a majority of Edison’s population is nonwhite — 35.9 percent Asian, 8.8. percent black and 7. 2 percent Hispanic.

“If I meet an Indian anywhere, everyone knows Edison, N.J.,” Mayor Choi said. “They know Mumbai, London and Edison.”

Immigrants like Edison’s Indians are the major reason that New Jersey, New York and Connecticut are not losing population, the statistics show. With more longtime residents leaving for jobs or retirement in states like Texas and North Carolina, the three states are barely growing and could even lose Congressional representatives.

New Jersey ranks 43rd among the states in growth, gaining fewer than 20,000 people between 2007 and 2006. “It’s a mature, densely developed state,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. “It’s very difficult to build in New Jersey due to regulations and anti-growth sentiment, and it’s an extraordinarily expensive place to live.”

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But there are some notable exceptions. Middlesex County, where Edison is located, had the largest growth last year of any New Jersey county, 5,256 people. It is newcomers who were born abroad, including those from Latin America settling in New Brunswick and Perth Amboy, who are spurring the county’s growth, the statistics show. One in five New Jerseyans is now foreign-born, says Mr. Hughes.

Some community leaders trace the beginning of the Indian migration to Edison to 1965, when a new immigration law that opened the doors to vastly more people from countries outside Europe was passed. Indians, many of them engineers, doctors and other professionals, began gaining a foothold in the apartments of Hoboken and Jackson Heights, Queens. Those who saved enough to buy houses found themselves drawn to Edison’s stock of inexpensive homes, well-regarded schools, easy access to highways, and location in an up-and-coming high-tech region.

At the same time, the town’s shopping strips — regarded in the 1950s and 1960s as the height of convenient commerce — were getting down at the heel, losing customers to malls. Indian merchants found they could purchase vacant shops for very little. The town was relatively welcoming because it had always been an immigrant hub, though many of the descendants of European immigrants had defected along with the departing factory jobs.

Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Sudhanshu Prasad, 54, Edison’s Indian councilman and an internist, came to New Jersey, where his sister lived, from eastern India. He first was a medical resident in Brooklyn. Then, 18 years ago, he, his wife and their two children ended up in the Edison area and watched it metamorphose from a caterpillar into a sprightly butterfly.

“It’s a cosmopolitan town,” he said. “In its schools, 70 odd languages are spoken. I like the people. They’re open-minded, very accepting.”

Movie City, the multiplex owned by an Indian immigrant, sells samosas in addition to popcorn. Restaurants along Oak Tree Road are gussying up. The new Urban Tadka, graced by chandeliers and opulent bathrooms, opened recently on the Woodbridge side, joining dining temples like Moghul.

Moghul’s owner, Satish C. Mehtani, 74, arrived here in 1970 as a civil engineer fresh from New Delhi, but found himself working two nonengineering jobs — as a bank teller and department store supervisor. In a labyrinthine career, he has cobbled together an empire of seven restaurants and has become something of a political rainmaker, raising $2 million altogether for Bill Clinton, Bill Bradley and others.

“Here in Edison we live the same way as we do in India, in harmony,” he said.

But not everyone would agree. Antonia Ricigliano, an Edison councilwoman, said she sometimes hears grumbling from constituents that “immigrants have been buying up homes, rather than people who worked hard to establish the community.”

Mrs. Ricigliano, 69, a mother of nine and grandmother of 16, said she worries that the booming population has created classrooms of more than 25 students and has clogged traffic on roads built for a rural age.

Pradip Kothari, a 61-year-old travel agent from the Gujarat region who is well known as a gadfly among Edison officials, can recount times where he felt that Indian immigrants were slighted. He tells of assaults on Indians by white teenage gangs and of two episodes where Indians said they had been beaten by the police.

“When we started establishing ourselves, we faced a lot of struggle,” Mr. Kothari said. “A few misguided people said we are trying to invade, taking over businesses from local people and we are outsiders.”

In the summer of 2006, police investigating fireworks outside a largely Indian housing complex arrested an immigrant they said had attacked an officer. In response, Indian community leaders including Mr. Kothari accused an officer of excessive force. When the mayor asked for a review, the police union said that Mr. Choi’s move was a “politically motivated” attempt to appease the Indian community.

Still, the mayor defends the police and said in an interview that the allegations of police brutality had been overplayed. But in the aftermath, he has required every patrol car to have a video camera and has mandated sensitivity training for every officer. He has also accelerated efforts to diversify Edison’s force of 190 officers, which includes one Indian and a handful of other Asians.

Mr. Kothari said it has sometimes been difficult to get the Indian community to come together in the face of flare-ups of intolerance. The community, he said, is divided by geography, “by dialect, by religion, by looks, by food habits, by cultural habits.”

“Indians are passive people,” he said. “They are grateful to America for opportunities and for success, and they think we should not fight for our rights.”

Raymond Smutko, part owner of the Oak Tree Shopping Center, where half the stores are rented by Indians, predicts that the Indian story will follow the same path as that of his Hungarian family. Youngsters are already adopting American ways and distancing themselves from their parents’ generation.

“These children will be like me,” he said. “They’ll have nothing to do with the old country. It only takes two generations.”

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