Indians third largest immigrant group in US: Study

Indians have emerged as the third-largest immigrant group in the US behind Mexicans and Chinese, with nearly 1.9 million of them living in the country, a new study by an American thinktank has said. Indian population in the US has grown to over 150 times its size since 1960, when the slightly more than 12,000 Indian immigrants represented less than 0.5 per cent of the total immigrant population of 9.7 million immigrants, a study by Migration Policy Institute has found. Till 2011, Indian-born immigrants accounted for almost five per cent (1.86 million) of America's 40.4 million immigrants. Almost one-third of all Indian immigrants resided in just two states- California and New Jersey. More than a quarter of them lived in three major metropolitan areas- New York, Chicago and San Jose. Two per cent of all unauthorised immigrants in the United States were also from India. The study also found that India was also the second most common country of origin for international students studying at US institutions of higher learning in 2011, behind China. According to the Institute of International Education, students from India accounted for 13 per cent (100,270) of the 764,495 international students studying at US institutions of higher learning during the 2011-12 academic year. As a group, immigrants from India are better educated, more likely to have strong English language skills and arrive on employment-based visas, and are less likely to live below the federal poverty line than the overall foreign-born population, the study says. Indian immigrant men outnumbered women in 2011. More than 29 per cent of employed Indian-born men worked in information technology occupations, while 19 per cent of employed women worked in management, business, and finance. The data for the study was collected from the US Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey (ACS), the 2000 Decennial Census (as well as earlier censuses), and the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) (2012 data). August 23, 2013 http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-08-23/news/41440668_1_unauthorised-immigrants-migration-policy-institute-higher-learning