India, which has just overtaken China as the world's most populous country, has more than 1.4 billion people. Its emigrants are more numerous and successful than their Chinese counterparts. The Indian diaspora is, as of 2010, the largest in the world.
Of the 281 million emigrants (broadly defined as people not living in the country of birth) spread across the globe today, almost 18 million are Indians, according to the latest United Nations estimates released in 2020. The Mexican emigrants, the second largest group, amount to 11.2 million. Overseas Chinese number 10.5 million.
Coming to understand how and why the Indians have ensured success abroad while the Chinese have sown suspicion illuminates geopolitical fault lines. The comparison of both groups also reveals the magnitude of the Indian achievements. Diaspora wins move India forward and benefit its Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Joe Biden will meet with him as part of Modi's visit to the United States on June 22.
Migrants maintain stronger ties to their country of origin than their foreign-born offspring, and thus establish vital links between adopted homes and birthplaces. In 2022, remittances sent to India reached a record high of almost $108 billion, around 3% of GDP, more than in any other country. In addition, Overseas Indians, with their contacts, language skills and experience, drive cross-border trade and investment.
A huge number of second, third and fourth generation Chinese live abroad; especially in Southeast Asia, the United States and Canada. Yet in many rich countries (including the United States and Britain), the Indian-born population outnumbers the Chinese-born (see chart 1).
Indians are spread all over the world (see Chart 2): 2.7 million live in the United States, more than 835,000 in Great Britain, 720,000 in Canada, and 579,000 in Australia. Young Indians flock to the Middle East, where low-skill jobs in construction and hospitality pay better. There are 3.5 million Indian emigrants in the United Arab Emirates and 2.5 million in Saudi Arabia (where the United Nations counts Indian citizens as an indicator of the Indian-born population). Many more live in Africa, other parts of Asia and the Caribbean, all as part of a migration route that dates back to colonial times.
India has the essential ingredients to be a leading exporter of talent: a mass of young people and first-class higher education. Proficiency in English, a legacy of British colonial rule, is also likely to help. In the United States, only 22% of Indian immigrants over the age of five say they have limited English proficiency, compared with 57% of Chinese immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a group of American reflection.
As the Indian population grows in the coming decades, its people will continue to move abroad to find work and escape the hot climate. Immigration rules in the rich world filter out graduates likely to work in professions with the highest demand for employees, such as medicine and computing. In 2022, 73% of US H-1B visas, a category for skilled workers in “specialty occupations” (such as computer scientists), were obtained by people born in India.
Many of India's best and brightest students appear to be preparing to emigrate. Consider the findings of a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Development Economics authored by Prithwiraj Choudhury of Harvard Business School, Ina Ganguli of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Patrick Gaule of the University of Bristol. The study analyzes the case of students who sat in 2010 for the entrance exams to the Indian Institutes of Technology, the country's elite engineering schools. The researchers found that, eight years later, 36% of the top 1,000 students had emigrated abroad, a percentage that rose to 62% among the top 100. Most went to the United States.
Another study looked at the top 20% of artificial intelligence researchers (defined as those whose papers were accepted in 2019 conferences with competitive selection of papers). 8% had graduated in India. However, the proportion of high-level researchers now working in India is so small that the researchers did not even record it.
In the United States, almost 80% of the Indian-born population have, after schooling, at least a college degree, according to estimates by MPI's Jeanne Batalova. Only 50% of the population born in China and 30% of the total population can say the same. Something similar happens in Australia, where, after the schooling process, almost two thirds of the population born in India, half of those born in China and only one third of the total population have a bachelor's degree or higher. Other rich countries do not collect comparable data.
Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor who coined the term “soft power,” points out that soft power is not automatically created simply by the presence of a diaspora. “However, if there are people in the diaspora who are successful and who create a positive image of the country of origin, that helps the country of origin.” And, as he points out, "India has a lot of very poor people, but it's not those people who come to the United States."
In fact, Indian emigrants are relatively wealthy even in the host countries. In the United States, they make up the highest-earning immigrant group, with a median household income of nearly $150,000 a year. That figure is double the national average and far exceeds that of Chinese immigrants, whose median household income is just over $95,000. In Australia, the average family income for Indian emigrants is close to $85,000 a year, compared with an average of about $60,000 across all households and $56,500 among the Chinese-born.
The power of the Indian diaspora is increasingly manifested at the top of business and at the top of government. Devesh Kapur and Aditi Mahesh, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, have calculated the number of people with Indian roots in top jobs, taking into account those born in India and those with Indian-born ancestors. They have identified 25 CEOs of companies in the S
Overseas Indians have only recently started accessing such prestigious positions. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a computer manufacturing company, recalls how difficult it was for Indian businessmen to make money in the United States in the 1980s. “You were a person with a funny accent and a hard name to pronounce, and you had to raise the bar higher,” he recalls. Today, Adobe, Alphabet, the corporate parent of Google, IBM and Microsoft are run by people of Indian descent. The deans of three of the top five business schools, including Harvard Business School, are also of Indian descent.
In the world of politics, the Indian diaspora is also thriving. Johns Hopkins researchers have counted 19 people of Indian descent in the British House of Commons, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. They have identified six in the Australian Parliament and five in the US Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris's mother was of Tamil Indian descent. And Ajay Banga, born in Pune, India, was chosen in early May to lead the World Bank after leading MasterCard for more than a decade.
The Chinese diaspora is the only group with comparable influence around the world. The richest man in Malaysia, for example, is Robert Kuok, an ethnic Chinese businessman whose vast empire includes the Shangri-La luxury hotel chain. However, in Europe and North America, Chinese descendants do not occupy as influential positions as their Indian counterparts.
As the United States slides into a new Cold War with China, Westerners increasingly perceive China as an enemy. The covid-19 pandemic, which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, is likely to have made matters worse. According to a recent poll on the attitudes of Americans carried out by the Gallup polling company, 84% of respondents say they view China quite negatively or have the same unfavorable opinion.
That mistrust of China spills over into the political arena. Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications equipment maker suspected in the past of breaking embargoes and serving as a conduit for spying on the Chinese government, has been banned from the United States. Some European countries are following suit. Strict national security reviews of foreign investment in US companies openly target Chinese money in Silicon Valley. People taking cues from China have been punished, including a former Harvard professor. Indian companies do not face such scrutiny.
In India, by contrast, government positions have been held (at least until Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, the Indian People's Party, BJP, came to power) by many people whose worldview had been shaped, in part at least for an education in the West. The first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru studied at Cambridge. Modi's predecessor, Manmohan Singh, studied at Oxford and Cambridge.
India's claims to be a democratic country steeped in liberal values help its diaspora to integrate more easily with the West. That diaspora, in turn, links India to the West. The most startling example came in 2008, when the US signed an agreement that effectively recognized India as a nuclear power, despite never having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (like Pakistan and Israel). Lobbying and fundraising efforts by Indian Americans helped push the deal through Congress.
The Indian diaspora also has a political stake in the country. It is estimated that in the months leading up to the 2014 general election in which Modi came to power, more than 8,000 Indians from Britain and the United States flew to India to join his campaign. Many more used text messages and social networks to capture votes in favor of the PJB. And they contributed unknown amounts of money to the campaign.
Under Modi, India's ties to the West have been put to the test. In an attempt to reassert its position as a non-aligned power, India has refused to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine and has stocked up on cheap Russian gas and fertilizer. Government civil servants spread nationalist rhetoric that pleases hotheads on the Hindu right. And in the country liberal liberties are curtailed. In March, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress Party, was disbarred from parliament on a trumped-up charge of defamation, following an Indian court's conviction of criminal defamation. Authorities harass journalists and raid their offices.
Overseas Indians help neither India nor the West give up. Modi knows that he cannot afford to lose his support and that it is impossible to force Indians with hybrid identity to choose sides. At a time when China and its friends want to take on a world order established by their rivals, it is vital for the West to keep India on its side. Despite its setback, it continues to be essential, as are its emigrants.
