Indian migration to US in focus ahead of polls

The United States is fast approaching the end of a lengthy presidential campaign in which the issue of immigration has taken centre stage.

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for failing to protect America’s borders, with Trump’s misleading claims that immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets emerging as one of the defining moments of the race so far. Harris, on the other hand, has gone on the offensive, blaming Trump for sabotaging a bipartisan Senate bill that would have beefed up border protection.

Amidst this back-and-forth, there’s been relatively little attention paid to the changing composition of who exactly is trying to enter the United States without prior authorisation. Since 2020, India has emerged as the country of origin for the largest number of migrants attempting to enter the United States outside of the Western Hemisphere.

A new analysis by the Niskanen Center summarises what we know — and what we don’t — about this surge from India. The authors of this new paper, Gil Guerra and Sneha Puri, were the featured guests on Grand Tamasha last week, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Guerra, Puri, and host Milan Vaishnav discussed the data on irregular migration, the surge in Indian encounters at the border, and the reasons behind the spike. Plus, the trio talked about the similarities and differences between Chinese and Indian migration, the recent controversies around Khalistani separatists in the diaspora, and the policy options facing the next US president.

Since October 2020, US Customs and Border Protection has encountered nearly 170,000 Indian migrants at both the southern and northern US land borders. Since 2021, the top three languages spoken by Indian migrants (other than English) is Punjabi, Hindi, and Gujarati, with Punjabi accounting for the lion’s share. In the last four years, there have been almost 86,000 encounters with Indian nationals at the southwest border — the most for an extra-hemispheric country, but still significantly less than some countries in Central and South America.

“One of the main obstacles in migrating through the Americas... is a piece of land called the Darien Gap in Panama, which is incredibly difficult to traverse. It is essentially ungoverned in some patches. It is often times very dangerous, arduous, and expensive to get through,” explained Guerra. “So, for many migrants, especially those coming outside of the hemisphere, there’s a very big premium on avoiding the Darien Gap because of all of those obstacles.”

A series of administrative and visa changes by several Central and South American governments has made it harder for Indians to access these countries.

As a result, there has been a sharp increase in irregular Indian migration focused on the Canadian border, where Indian nationals make up the largest proportion of irregular migrants, after Canadian migrants. But, according to Puri, “In fiscal year 2024, there have actually been more Indian nationals than Canadian nationals migrating irregularly. There have been no indications or trends that this is going to go downwards, at least in the foreseeable future.”

Puri explained that there are no Central or South American countries that come even close to 1,000 per year, except for Mexico.