As of 2007 most Hmong people in the State of Michigan live in northeastern Detroit, but they have been increasingly moving to Pontiac and Warren.
[2] The Hmong had moved to Detroit in order to obtain employment and so members of the same families could live in the same area.
[6] As of 2002 the concentrations of Hmong and Laotian people in the tri-county area were in northeast Detroit, southern Warren, and central Pontiac.
[7] In 2002 Booza and Metzger wrote that "The 3,943 Hmong living in tri-county area are one of the most concentrated of the Asian groups.
[9] Emily Lawsin, a lecturer in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan, stated in 2006 that most Asians in the City of Detroit are Hmong.
[15] Smith stated that due to the small size of the Detroit Hmong community, the teaching sector and the restaurant sector "occupies [sic] a non-trivial share of the adult population and allows a substantial number of Hmong to work with co-ethnics.
Natalie Jill Smith, author of the PhD thesis "Ethnicity, Reciprocity, Reputation and Punishment: An Ethnoexperimental Study of Cooperation among the Chaldeans and Hmong of Detroit (Michigan)" wrote that the activity in the group had declined by 2001: now it had once monthly meetings to plan the annual Hmong New Year festival, and the organization itself "consists of a room with an answering machine.
[14] In 2006 two Hmong high school students who spoke at a forum hosted by the United Asian American Organizations at the University of Michigan stated that the upholding of traditional family obligations and the lack of English knowledge from their parents complicated their high school careers.
[5] Smith stated that she had been told that the percentage of Christians in the Detroit Hmong community had ranged from 25% to 50% but that it "is not known with certainty".
[21] The film Gran Torino depicts a Hmong family living in Metro Detroit.