Indians merely 2% of total illegal immigrants in US: New research paper | World News

While official data for 2023 isn’t available, this means that the proportion of illegal Indian immigrants as a part of the larger Indian population in America dropped from 16.6% in 2015 to 6.9% in 2022.

Even as the stock of illegal Indian migrants in the US dipped, their flow has increased in recent years.

The number of illegal border apprehensions of Indians jumped from 1,000 in 2020 to 43,000 in 2023. The number of asylum applications from Indians surged from 5,000 in 2021 to 51,000 in 2023. There was a shift in entry of these illegal migrants from exclusively the US’s southwestern border with Mexico to its northern border with Canada. And Punjabi-speakers constituted the largest proportion of illegal immigrants.

These are the key findings of a new paper, authored by political scientist Devesh Kapur and PhD scholar Abby Budiman, published by the Johns Hopkins University on Monday.

The research findings show a far more complicated landscape than the narrative suggesting an outright spike in the number of illegal Indian immigrants. It has also been published at a time when a political controversy has broken out in India on the nature of the deportations from the US under the Donald Trump presidency and in the run-up to the visit of the PM Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington DC where the issue is expected to figure in talks between the two leaders.

The numbers debate

The paper points out that there is one official source of data for illegal immigrants: DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics. There are three other sources that the US government deems credible: Pew, Center for Migration Studies (CMS) and Migration Policy Institute.

The uncertainty over the number of illegal Indian immigrants comes from a divergence in DHS data and data of the other three non-government sources since 2019.

For 2022, while DHS estimated there to be 220,000 illegal Indian immigrants, both Pew and CMS suggested there were 700,000 such Indians in the US. “If the estimates of the Pew Research Center and CMS are to be believed, then nearly one of every four Indian immigrant in the US is unauthorised… This is highly improbable,” note the authors.

According to DHS, the number of illegal Indian immigrants in the US increased from 28,000 in 1990 to 120,000 in 2000 to 270,000 in 2010 to 560,000 in 2016, before dropping to 220,000 in 2022.

“The official DHS estimate put roughly 7% of all foreign-born Indians in the US as unauthorized in 2022, a decline from approximately 17% in 2015 and around 9% in 2000. Overall, Indians account for a small proportion of the total unauthorised population in the US, comprising just 2% in 2022, down from nearly 4% in 2015. Since the share of Indian population in the overall US foreign-born population was 7%, this indicates that Indians are substantially underrepresented in the unauthorized immigrant population. Although this data predates the 2023 surge in Indians encountered at US borders, this would not change this finding significantly,” say Budiman and Kapur.

The states with the highest number of illegal Indian immigrants are the same as the highest number of legal Indian migrants: California, Texas, New Jersey, New York and Illinois.

But Indians account for more than 10% of the share of the total unauthorised population in Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. And illegal Indians constitute over a quarter of the share of total Indians in the state in Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia, Wisconsin and California.

The political salience of the issue may come from the fact there is a higher share of illegal Indian immigrants than their national share in four key swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin and two other Red States — Tennessee and Indiana. While they do not vote as non-citizens, their presence may have created a political backlash around the issue.

The recent surge

But Budiman and Kapur point out that there has been a recent surge. From 2020 to 2023, the number of border encounters and apprehensions of Indians increased from merely 1000 to 43,000, dropping to 40,000 in 2024.

There has also been a shift in the entry points. The paper points out that since 2010, the apprehensions of Indians was exclusively along the southwest border (California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas), but in 2024, 36% of the total border apprehensions of Indians happened along the northern US-Canada border.

With the US system allowing those apprehended at the border to apply for asylum if they feared persecution, the paper points to an increase in asylum applications from 5000 in 2020 to 51,000 in 2023 (a trend that Budiman and Kapur also note is visible in Indian asylum applications in three other countries, UK, Canada and Australia).

Punjabi-speakers, the paper’s authors point out, remain the largest pool of Indian immigrants applying for asylum. “Between 2001 and 2022, two-thirds (66%) of asylum cases involving Indian nationals were filed by Punjabi speakers… Following Punjabi, the other common languages spoken by Indian asylum requesters were Hindi (14%), English (8%) and Gujarati (7%).” Cases involving Punjabi speakers also saw the highest approval rates for asylum requests, with 63% granted asylum compared to 58% Hindi speakers and 25% Gujarati speakers receiving approval.

Budiman and Kapur suggest that this data is evidence that a vast majority of asylum seekers from India are economic migrants in search of better opportunities. “We can be confident of this claim since we see very little evidence of India’s poor marginalised communities or those from regions with ongoing anti-militancy operations by the government among asylum seekers. Indeed, the financial costs of coming to the US, whether through the arduous journey through Latin and Central America to Mexico, or as “fake” international students to Canada, are 30-50 times India’s per capita income… Even illegality take a lot of money to pursue.”