Adobe, Britain and Chanel are all run by people with Indian roots.
HAVING JUST surpassed China as the world’s most populous country, India contains more than 1.4bn people. What’s more, its migrants are both more numerous and more successful than their Chinese peers. The Indian diaspora has been the largest in the world since 2010, and is a powerful resource for India’s government.
Of the 281m migrants spread around the globe today—generally defined as people who live outside the country where they were born—almost 18m are Indians, according to the latest UN estimates from 2020 (see chart 1). Mexican migrants, who comprise the second-biggest group, number some 11.2m. Chinese abroad come to 10.5m.
Understanding how and why Indians have triumphed abroad, whereas Chinese have tended to sow suspicion, illuminates geopolitical faultlines. Comparing the two groups also reveals the extent of Indian achievement. The diaspora’s wins both promote India’s image and benefit its prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Migrants have stronger ties to their motherlands than their descendants born abroad, and so build vital links between their adopted homes and their birthplaces. In 2022 India’s inward remittances hit a record of almost $108bn, around 3% of GDP, more than in any other country. And overseas Indians with contacts, language skills and know-how boost cross-border trade and investment.
Huge numbers of second-, third- and fourth-generation Chinese live abroad, notably in South-East Asia, America and Canada. But in many rich countries, including America and Britain, the Indian-born population exceeds the Chinese-born.
Indian-born migrants are found across the world (see chart 2), with 2.7m living in America, more than 835,000 in Britain, 720,000 in Canada, and 579,000 in Australia. Young Indians flock to the Middle East, where low-skilled construction and hospitality jobs are better paid. There are 3.5m Indian migrants in the United Arab Emirates and 2.5m in Saudi Arabia (where the UN counts Indian citizens as a proxy for the Indian-born population). Many more dwell in Africa and other parts of Asia and the Caribbean.
India has the essential ingredients to be a leading exporter of talent: a mass of young people and first-class higher education. Indians’ mastery of English, a legacy of British colonial rule, probably helps, too. Only 22% of Indian immigrants in America above the age of five say they have no more than a limited command of English, compared with 57% of Chinese immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute (mpi), an American think-tank.
The way things were
Since Indian independence in 1947 there have been several waves of migration to the rich world, enabling the diaspora to grow in number and might. The first, in the years following the second world war, involved low-skilled workers largely from the states of Gujarat and Punjab. A multitude went to Britain, which was facing acute labour shortages. They worked in tough places, such as textile mills and other industrial outfits.
Many Indians whose families had moved to eastern Africa in the colonial period as indentured labourers later went west, too. America managed to attract a host of talented individuals by overhauling its immigration laws in 1965. Quotas that barred Indian nationals were out, new rules that favoured highly skilled migrants were in. Australia and Canada then followed suit with batches of similar regulations.
As the Indian diaspora has grown, it has also become more diverse. An increasing number of Indians from poor and marginalised backgrounds are moving abroad. Of Indian-Americans that identify with a caste group, in a 2020 survey published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank in Washington, DC, 17% described themselves as lower-caste. Migrants no longer come mainly from Gujarat and Punjab. South Indians are emigrating in droves. The American consulate in the southern city of Hyderabad is the largest outpost that America has in southern Asia. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing language in America is Telugu, which is spoken almost exclusively in the south of India.
Brains on the move
As India’s population expands over the coming decades, its people will continue to move overseas to find lucrative jobs and to escape its ferocious heat. Immigration rules in the rich world filter for graduates who can work in professions with demand for more employees, such as medicine and information technology. In 2022 73% of America’s H-1B visas, which are given to skilled workers in “speciality occupations” such as computer scientists, were won by people born in India.
Many of India’s best and brightest seem to prepare themselves to migrate. Arvind Subramanian, a former economic adviser to the Indian government, says that they are, in the economic jargon, “highly positively selected migrants”. Consider the findings of a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Development Economics by Prithwiraj Choudhury of Harvard Business School, Ina Ganguli of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Patrick Gaule of the University of Bristol. It analysed the results of students who took the highly competitive entrance exams for the Indian Institutes of Technology, the country’s elite engineering schools, in 2010. Eight years later, the researchers found that 36% of the 1,000 best performers had migrated abroad, rising to 62% among the 100 best. Most went to America.
Another study looked at the top 20% of researchers in artificial intelligence (defined as those who had papers accepted for a competitive conference in 2019). It found that 8% did their first degree in India. But only a tiny number of researchers now work there.
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This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Making it as migrants"

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