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In 2021, at least 34.55 lakh Indians lived in the US. Of them, close to 21 per cent may have been undocumented, suggests businessline’s analysis of the Global Migration Database and Pew Research Centre’s report on unauthorised immigrants. At the same time, numbers from the US Customs and Border Protection show that there has been a spike in the number of Indians caught trying to illegally cross the border into the US, since 2020.
Pew’s report, which was out in the second week of November, notes that in 2021, 7.25 lakh Indians lived illegally in the US. They formed the third highest undocumented immigrant population, after 41 lakh Mexicans and 8 lakh El Salvadorans. At that time, 7 lakh Guatemalans also lived illegally in the US. The report adds that the illegal immigrant population from India, Guatemala and Hondurans saw an increase since 2017. At the same time, the number of Indians giving up their citizenship for US citizenship has also risen in this period.
In three States of the US — New Hampshire, New Jersey and Ohio, a majority of all the undocumented immigrants were Indians. New Jersey is also the State with the fifth highest number of illegal immigrants, after California, Texas, Florida and New York.
Commenting on this number, S Irudaya Rajan, Chair of the International Institute for Migration and Development, Kerala, said that the documentation of none of these immigrants happened in India but at the destination country. “It is impossible today for anyone to leave India without proper travel documents,” he says, adding that a lot of these cases would have happened when people overstayed after the expiry of their visas. “These days, there is an increase in the number of young people who go abroad to study. Not everyone finds a job upon graduating and many tend to work while in the country on an expired student visa,” says Rajan, adding that many countries are liberal about providing visas.
Spike in illegal border crossings
Pew’s study looks at the number of illegal immigrants until 2021. However, data from the USCPB shows a big increase in the number of Indians caught while crossing the border to the US illegally. In FY20 (between October 1, 2019 and September 30, 2020), 19,883 Indians were caught. The number shot up to 30,662 in FY21. In FY22, it was 63,927, a growth of more than 100 per cent.
The number was 96,917 in FY23, which ended recently. Between October 1 and October 31, another 8,499 Indians were caught for illegally entering the US. The list of people includes adults and children.
Experts say that one cannot ignore the human smuggling angle here, pointing out a case from January 2022, where an Indian family froze to death while crossing the Canada-US border.
A further breakdown of the border-crossing data shows that between October 1, 2019, and October 31, 2023, 67,923 Indians entered the US illegally through the Southwest Land Border. T
he border separates Mexico and the US and is considered the most-frequently crossed international boundary in the world.
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