Asian Indians in the United States

SIGNIFICANCE: The roughly 4.8 million people of Asian Indian origin or descent living in the United States have contributed significantly to their adopted nation. The Asian Indian community contains a large proportion of well-educated, affluent, and highly motivated people.

Emigration from South Asia has been a dominant behavioral pattern since the Indus Valley civilization (2500–1700 BCE). The impact of merchants and Buddhist missionaries from India is evident today in Central and East Asia, where Indian mythology, dance, and theater have had lasting effects. Movement from western India to Africa dates back to the second century CE. Small-scale movement changed to mass emigration as Indian people provided cheap labor for British colonies, many becoming indentured servants. The result was a diaspora of nine million Indian people scattered throughout the British Empire but concentrated in places with labor-intensive economies, especially plantation systems, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, and East Africa. Wide-scale migration to the United States, Australia, and Canada developed in the 1960s, largely because changes in immigration regulations removed existing racial barriers. The oil-rich Middle East has become a focus for South Asian immigration since 1970.

Coming to America

Initially, Asian Indian people came to the United States as sea captains and traders in the 1790s, actively pursuing trade between India and North America. A very few came as indentured laborers. By 1900, the nation was home to about two thousand Indian people, including about five hundred merchants, several dozen religious teachers, and some medical professionals. Six thousand Indian people entered the United States through the West Coast between 1907 and 1917, but another three thousand were barred entry. Many of these immigrants came from Canada, where they had faced hostilities, only to meet with the same sort of treatment in the United States. Most immigrants from India during this period originated from Punjab and were adherents of the Sikh faith.

As Indian immigration increased, anti-Asian violence on the West Coast began to target Indian people. Discriminatory laws were passed, prohibiting them from owning land and being eligible for U.S. citizenship. In fact, the Immigration Act of 1917 is sometimes referred to as the Indian Exclusion Act. The hostile environment, along with the Great Depression of the 1930s, resulted in several thousand immigrants returning to India. Therefore, in 1940, only 2,405 Asian Indian people were living in the United States, mostly around Yuba City, California.

After World War II, new legislation gave Asian Indian people the rights to become citizens and own land and established a quota of one hundred immigrants per year, allowing for family reunification. Between 1948 and 1965, 6,474 Asian Indian people entered the United States as immigrants. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the national origins clause in U.S. immigration legislation and gave preference to highly educated and skilled individuals. India had a ready pool of such talent, and the mass movement from India to the United States began. Sixty-seven percent of the foreign-born Asian Indian people in the United States have advanced degrees, as opposed to only 25 percent of the American-born. In addition, Asian Indian people are highly represented in the managerial and sales/technical/clerical workers and have low representation in the service, blue-collar categories.

The post-1965 immigrants fall into three categories: initial immigrants, second-wave immigrants, and sponsored immigrants. The initial immigrants, who came soon after restrictions were lifted in 1965, are mainly very highly educated men—doctors, scientists, and academics—who migrated for better educational and professional opportunities. By the 1990s, most of these immigrants, now middle-aged, were earning more than $100,000 annually. Their wives typically had little more than a high school education and did not work outside the home, and their children were in their late teens or early twenties. This first wave of immigrants were concerned about retirement and their children. The second-wave immigrants, who came in the 1970s, were also highly educated professionals. However, these professionals tended to be couples, both of whom worked. Their children were mostly college-bound teenagers, and one of their main concerns was getting their children through college. The third group of immigrants were those individuals sponsored by established family members. They generally were less well educated and more likely to be running motels, small grocery stores, gas stations, and other ventures. Their concerns were to establish themselves in a successful business.

Profile

The Asian Indian population in the United States—which consisted of about 7,000 people in 1970—grew to about one million by the late 1990s, making them the fourth-largest immigrant group. This group reached 815,447 in 1990, a 111 percent rise since 1980, when they numbered 387,000. The percentage of foreign-born was up from 70 percent in 1980 to 75 percent in 1990. By 2000 their number was about 2.8 million, and by 2013, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Asian Indian Americans had approximately tripled from the late 1990s, to almost 3 million people. The 2020 Census data revealed that the Asian Indian population grew over 50 percent from 2010 to 2020, climbing to 4,397,737.

The community is, on the average, getting younger; the median age dropped from thirty years in 1980 to twenty-eight years in 1990. However, over the same period, the size of the elderly population increased. The gender balance has become more equitable as well. In 1966, women made up 34 percent of the population; in 1993, they accounted for 53 percent. In the mid-1990s, the mean family income of Asian Indian people reached $59,777, the highest of any Asian group. In the 1980s, the trend to sponsor relatives was very strong, thus lowering the overall education and income levels of the community. By 1990, the number of individuals at the poverty level had doubled, but they still represented about the same percentage of the whole population of Asian Indian people. By the early twenty-first century, things had changed. The median age rose in 2021 to forty, and men once again outnumbering women, with 52 percent of the population male and 48 percent female.

The post-1965 immigrants flocked to the major metropolitan areas, where their skills were most marketable. By the mid-1990s, 70 percent of the Asian Indian population lived in eight major industrial-urban states: California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. However, the Asian Indian people in the United States generally do not live in concentrated areas but are dispersed throughout the city. The vast majority speak English and are familiar with American ways, so they do not need to rely on their compatriots for help. In addition, because many of them are professionals, they are affluent enough to live where they choose.

The educational attainment of the Asian Indian population is very high. As of 2021, 72 percent of Asian Indian Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and they form sizable proportions of the student bodies at the elite colleges in the United States.

The Asian Indian population uses lobbying and campaign contributions to promote its special interests, which range from revisions of immigration policy to efforts to prevent or minimize Pakistan’s military buildup.

One of the best-known areas of South Asian entrepreneurial behavior is the hotel and motel business. Hindus from the Gujarat region in India, most with the surname of Patel, began arriving in California in the late 1940s. They bought dilapidated hotels and motels in deteriorating neighborhoods and, with cheap family labor, turned the businesses into profitable enterprises. In the mid-1980s, the newsstand business in New York City was dominated by Indian and Pakistani immigrants, who controlled 70 percent of the kiosks. However, ten years later, they were being replaced by immigrants from the Middle East. South Asian people have also been prominently involved in laundromats, gift shops, and the garment industry. In the early 1990s, 40 percent of the gas stations in New York City were owned by Punjabi Sikh immigrants.

India has benefited tremendously from emigration to the United States. Remittances, sent by immigrants to remaining family, have made areas such as Gujarat and Punjab relatively prosperous. Large amounts of capital from abroad have been invested in high technology, and new ideas from the United States and elsewhere are also evident. By the mid-1990s, many Asian Indian people had returned from abroad to set up industries or work for international companies establishing a presence in India. The bicultural knowledge and skills of these returnees have contributed to Hyderabad’s becoming the Silicon Valley of India. However, the impact is not limited to Hyderabad; it can be seen in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi as well as Punjab’s prosperous agricultural Doab region.

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