Indian Immigration to the US

Indian Immigration

India passed China in 2023 as the world's most populated country and now sits at ~1.46 billion people. It is also the largest source of migrants: approximately 18.5 million people born in India live abroad. India's own foreign ministry counts 35.4 million overseas Indians once second-generation people of Indian origin are included.

The 3.2 million Indian immigrants in the United States today represent 6% of the American foreign-born population and the second-largest immigrant group after Mexicans.Britain's 1,888,641 Indians, recorded in the 2021 census, are the largest ethnic minority in both England and Wales. Australia's Indian-born population is at nearly one million, approximately 3.4% of the country . And in Canada, the Indian population has reached over 1.8 million, or 5.1% of the country.

What the Western world has absorbed from India so far represents a tiny fraction of the country's total population. For example, the 35.4 million overseas Indians discussed above comes out to just 2.4% of their population. Contrast that with Cuba, who have 12% of their country living in the US, or Mexico, with 8% in the US, or El Salvador, with 20% in the US. India can safely send millions more of its citizens abroad without feeling any notable population declines . And when you add in the pull of remittances ($129 billion in 2024, more than any other country on earth, 27.7% of it sent from the US), the incentives become even greater.

Indian migration, like many other forms of non-foundational immigration, to the United States is almost entirely a post-1965 phenomenon and mostly a post-1990 one. The Indian immigrant population rose fivefold between 1980 and 2000, then tripled again between 2000 and 2024. Between 2010 and 2024 alone it grew 78%, three times the rate of the foreign-born population as a whole.

The instrument was the Immigration Act of 1990. It raised the annual cap from 270,000 to 675,000, created the H-1B category, and set the employment-based green card allocation at 140,000 a year including dependents. Every structural feature of Indian migration described below, the visa pipeline and the queue behind it, is a consequence of that single statute.

Remittances

Mexico is the largest destination for estimated US remittances in the World Bank / KNOMAD’s 2021 bilateral model, at $52.6 billion. India follows at $15.8 billion. The chart compares the ten largest destinations using one dataset and one reference year.

Switch to per capita to divide each estimated total by the number of immigrants from that country living in the United States. The same ten destinations are re-ranked: Nigeria and Guatemala lead on this measure. US-born descendants are excluded from the denominator. These are modeled comparisons, not measured payments per sender.

Remittances help explain the appeal of working abroad: earnings in a higher-income economy can support relatives at home. Their size alone does not measure the effect of immigration on American wages. That requires evidence about hiring, pay and the jobs that would otherwise exist.

Cultural Differences

Indian immigrants bring different languages, institutions, migration histories and, for many, religious traditions. India’s income per person is far below the United States’ in the cited figures—approximately $2,540 versus approximately $80,000—so newcomers may arrive with experiences that differ sharply from those of most Americans. Those differences describe background, not an individual’s character or ability to participate in American civic life.

Integration should therefore be evaluated through conduct, language, law and civic participation, rather than assigned wholesale to a population. The policy question is whether immigration levels and settlement patterns allow those standards to be met over time.

H-1B and High Paying Jobs

The H-1B Visa program remains one of the biggest mistakes in recent decades. While Americans have seen competition for jobs, resources, and housing go up, immigrants have taken the jobs that competition was for. Instead of training Americans to fill them, employers brought in Indian nationals already trained, at a wage the employer certified as below the local median. For every Indian taking a $100k a year job, an American no longer has that job (as they would have pre-1990 ) and has a lower salary. And to make matters worse, that American then has to compete for housing and resources with the influx of Indians and other migrants, leading to higher overall costs.

Indian nationals receive approximately 71% of all H-1B visas. In computer-related roles, which are the bulk of the programme, the reported median salary was $123,600 in 2023. While the H-1B was sold as a way to bring in the "best-of-the-best" and truly unique talent, it now brings in bachelor's-level IT and programming, with engineering, finance and medicine in far smaller numbers. Eighty-five percent of new petitions are certified at the two lowest of four wage levels, and the entry level for computer occupations sits approximately 34% below the local median for the same work. With a population 4.2 times the size of the United States, India supplying the most candidates is arithmetic rather than a finding about talent.

Higher for Indian-origin residents

Indian households record a median income of $151,200, the highest of any group in the country and well above the national median of $80,610.

These figures are presented by progressives, liberals, and even many conservatives/libertarians as a positive, proof that the selection system works. The figure that gets left out is what happened to everyone else. Real wages for American workers with a high school education or less fell at the top, middle and bottom of their distribution over the same decades, while the college wage premium widened from 134% of high school wages in 1979 to 168% by 2016. Indians have certainly benefited from the last few decades. Americans who can trace their roots well before 1990, and who do not hold a degree, have not. The question with immigration always has to be - is it benefiting the people here at the current moment? Americans in the country before 1990 have not been benefited, at least in terms of lineage.

The United States is certainly a meritocracy and a capitalist country. Are we a globalist country? Is the job of the US to simply allow all foreigners into our nation, competing with American workers and driving up costs? If an Indian person is better for a job than a native-born American, does that Indian person merit that job? What about if you apply this statement to tens of millions of high-paying jobs, where the average American-born needs to compete with ten foreigners due to simple demographics (the US represents 5% of the world's population after all)? This is the issue of combining meritocracy with globalism.

Why one community, and not the whole market

An open market did not produce owners from everywhere. It produced owners from one district in one Indian state. The reason sits in the structure of the 1965 immigration law.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 built admissions around family preference. A naturalized citizen could petition for a sibling. That sibling, once naturalized, could petition for his own spouse, children, and siblings. Every admission opened the door to the next. The law rewarded whoever already stood inside it with a large family waiting outside.

The Patidars of central Gujarat had both. A motel owner in California could bring over a brother, house him in the motel, teach him the front desk, and lend him the down payment on the next property. The brother repeated it with the next relative. The capital came from inside the community, the labor came from the family, and the visas came from a law that made kinship the qualification. A hundred-mile stretch around the town of Anand reproduced itself along the American interstate.

The 1924 Act had done the reverse. It cut admissions by four-fifths and held them there for forty years, and the Irish, Italian, and Polish arrivals already in the country spread out and became American. Family-preference immigration concentrates where the 1924 system dispersed. It favors the groups with the largest families and the densest networks, and it grows enclaves faster than it grows citizens.

None of this is a knock on the owners. They took properties no one else wanted, worked them without payroll, and built real wealth, and they did it while competitors posted "American Owned" signs and insurers charged them more. What the 1965 law changed was who could do it. It handed the advantage to whoever arrived with the largest family and the tightest network, and in the motel trade that was the Patidars of Anand. Today 36,807 hotels and motels, approximately 60% of the country's total, carry an AAHOA member's name.