US benefits from Indian
migration By Siddharth
Srivastava
NEW DELHI - Most illegal
immigrants to the United States are from Mexico
and Central America, but the greatest percentage
increase (133%) in their ranks during 2000-05 was
from India, according to the Office of Immigration
Statistics in the US Department of Homeland
Security.
It is estimated that there were
about 260,000 undocumented
Indians living in the US,
compared with nearly 6 million from Mexico and
smaller but substantial numbers from El Salvador
and Guatemala. The total Indian population in the
US was 1.6 million, according to the 2000 census.
But the statistical portrait of the US
reveals other interesting information about
Indians - legal or illegal - emigrating to the
United States. They are among the wealthiest of
the Asian immigrant groups, exceeding in average
income (US$51,900) even the Japanese ($50,900).
They earn more than the national average of
$37,057 and the Asian-American average of $40,650.
Indians are the third-most-populous Asian
ethnic group in the US after the Chinese and the
Filipinos, and they number more than Koreans and
Vietnamese. These five national groups each number
a million or more and make up 80% of the
Asian-American population.
India derives
benefits from its overseas workforce to the tune
of more than $20 billion in annual remittances,
roughly 10% of the world's total. This figure even
exceeds the money remitted to Mexico by the far
larger population of legal and illegal migrants
from that country working in the US.
Indians also had the highest percentage of
people in management, professional and related
services - 60%, compared with 44% overall for
Asian-Americans and 34% nationwide.
But it
is in the area of education and professional
achievement that Indians score the highest. Some
63.9% of Indians in the US have a university
degree or higher, contrasted with 44% for
Asian-Americans and 24.4% for Americans as a
whole. Indians were also most likely to be
employed - 79.1% of Indian men and 54% of Indian
women were part of the US labor force.
Observers say that the problem of illegal
immigration lies in the thousands who do not have
the specialized skills that are in demand in
Western countries. Frauds step in to feed on the
anxieties of those seeking a better life.
In India, the collusion of officials,
politicians and others form an illegal immigration
machinery that is estimated to be a $500 million
business. The Geneva-based International
Organization for Migration believes it is a $7
billion global business.
It is estimated
that more than 500 emigration agencies, legal and
illegal, are in the populous and affluent belt of
Chandigarh-Panchkula-Mohali area alone, in Punjab.
Among the prominent cases of emigration
fraud detected in India include the case of
popular bhangra singer Daler Mehndi's elder
brother Shamsher Singh, who was arrested as head
of a visa racket that allegedly charged hopeful
emigrants more than $30,000 to be included in
Daler's dance troupe as a surefire way to procure
visas to developed countries. The troupe members
went missing on arrival.
In other cases
busted in the recent past, a travel agent based in
the state of Haryana tried to smuggle 30
youngsters on the lookout for jobs abroad to Seoul
as members of a bhangra troupe. Suspicious
immigration authorities, however, stopped them, as
none of the overweight and portly group members
appeared fit for a jig. Again, five members of a
Punjab-based girls' cricket team that had gone to
London for a tournament went missing.
Recently the Foreign Ministry stripped a
special secretary of the Indian Foreign Service,
Rakesh Kumar, of his post for his alleged
involvement in a human-trafficking case. It was
the first time that action had been taken against
such a senior government functionary.
The
charges against Kumar relate to the time when he
was director general of the Indian Council for
Cultural Relations, which selects artists who
represent the country in official functions
abroad. Kumar is accused of breaking the rules and
hurriedly empaneling a bhangra troupe of 15
people, of whom nine disappeared on arrival in
Berlin. The Central Bureau of Investigation, which
is probing the case, suspects that each of the
nine members paid Kumar close to $10,000 for
sending them to Germany.
According to
several studies, developed societies such as the
US, Canada and Britain have benefited from
immigration, legal and illegal. These countries
would long have been in recession had there been
no influx of highly skilled technical graduates
from India and China in the form of software
engineers, nurses and doctors, and others such as
electricians, drivers and domestic workers at the
low end of the job market. Experts say the task at
hand involves separating the legitimate
aspirations of people from the nefarious designs
of fly-by-night operators.
In the past few
years, skilled engineers laid off in the US or
whose temporary visas have expired because of
reduced quotas have promptly returned to India to
garner prime jobs available because of a booming
economy. Advocates of unfettered, mutually
beneficial globalization, such as Jagdish
Bhagwati, have thus underlined the need to remove
barriers for movement of unskilled labor. Others
say that the key lies in creating an enabling
environment of education and skill creation that
makes these people eligible for jobs and
prosperity within and outside the country.
Until this is done, exploiters will
continue to sway desperate folks in pursuit of
opportunity, and globalization will remain a game
in which while many will benefit, some will lose
out.
Siddharth Srivastava is a
New Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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