Monday, February 18, 2008

Illegal Immigration From India Jumps 125 Percent

There are an estimated 270,000 illegal Indian immigrants in the United States, according to 2006 figures from the US Department of Homeland Security. With 125% percent increase from 2000 to 2006, India represents the fastest growing source of illegal immigrants to the United States, reports San Jose Mercury News, a major Silicon Valley newspaper. In absolute numbers, Central and South American nations account for the bulk of the estimated 11.5 million illegals, with India a distant second with 270,000 in 2006.



The vast majority of the estimated 2.5m Indians in the United States are legal immigrants with about a half of them with citizenship status. Highly educated with many in professionals such as doctors and engineers, Indians are a very affluent ethnic group whose median household income is 62% higher than the national average.

The top three geographies with the highest concentrations of Indians in the US are San Francisco Bay Area at number 1, New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area at number 2 and Chicago at number 3.

As the demand for high-tech workers in Silicon Valley has grown, so has the influx of Indians on H-1B visas. At 44%, Indians accounted for the lion's shares of H1B visas in 2005-06, five times the number from the second-place Chinese.

The estimated number of people of Pakistani origin in the United States is about 500,000. The top three geographies are NY/NJ/CT tri-state area, Chicago metropolitan area and Southern California. Pakistani Americans are the sixth largest Asian American ethnic group after Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese communities. The demographics and socio-economic status of Pakistanis in the United States are quite similar to Indians'. Pakistan does not show up in the list of top 10 countries of origin for legal or illegal immigration to the United States.

New York Times estimate of 109,000 Pakistani-born American workers' occupations include salesmen, managers or administrators, drivers, doctors and accountants as the top five categories.

15 comments:

Riaz Haq said...

Student, mostly Indians, with visa to atend Pleasanton California based Trivalley University are facing deportation from US.

Federal officials are accusing a Pleasanton university of serving as a front for an illegal immigration operation that accepted millions of dollars to obtain student visas for foreign nationals.

In a complaint filed on Wednesday, federal prosecutors call Tri-Valley University a "sham" and accuse its founder, Susan Su, of fraud.

They say the university made false statements to the Department of Homeland Security that allowed hundreds of people — mostly from India — to stay in the United States on student visas.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_17151508?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com&nclick_check=1

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a 2010 Times of India sory on illegal immigration into US from India:


WASHINGTON: In 2009, India accounted for the third highest increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the US in ten years, according to a new government report, though only two percent of all illegal immigrants were Indians.

The number of illegal immigrants in the US fell by seven percent to 10.8 million last year.

A majority of them came from Latin America, according to the department of homeland security (DHS) report, though India with 200,000 was the sixth biggest sender of illegal immigrants to the US.

In overall numbers, Indians accounted for only two percent of illegal immigrants. Mexico (6.7 million) topped the list with 62 percent, followed by those from El Salvador (530,000), Guatemala (480,000), Honduras (320,000) and the Philippines (270,000).

Between 2000 and 2009, the Mexican-born unauthorised immigrants increased by two million or 42 percent. But the greatest percentage increases occurred among unauthorised immigrants from Honduras (95 percent), Guatemala (65 percent), and India (64 percent).

"The number of unauthorised residents declined by one million between 2007 and 2009, coincident with the US economic downturn," said the report based on census data and extrapolations from the total foreign population in the country.

Beside the US and global financial crisis, other reasons the report adduces for the drop in the undocumented population include tougher border enforcement and a national crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The overall annual average increase in the unauthorised population during the 2000-09 period was 250,000 with ten leading countries of origin representing 85 percent of the unauthorised immigrant population in 2009.

Of the nearly 11 million undocumented people living in the US in January 2009, 37 percent, or four million, arrived since January 2000, 44 percent since the 1990s and 19 percent since the 1980s, the DHS said.

Between January 2008 and January 2009, the number of unauthorised immigrants living in the US decreased seven percent from 11.6 million to 10.8 million after growing from 8.5 million to 11.8 million between 2000 and 2007, DHS said.

An estimated 8.5 million of the 10.8 million unauthorised immigrants living in the US in 2009 were from the North America region, including Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. The next leading regions of origin were Asia (980,000) and South America (740,000).

California remained the leading state of residence of the illegal immigrants in 2009, with 2.6 million, followed by Texas (1.7 million), Florida (720,000), New York (550,000) and Illinois (540,000).

California's share of the national total was 24 percent in 2009 compared to 30 percent in 2000. The greatest percentage increase in the illegal population between 2000 and 2009 occurred in Georgia (115 percent), Nevada (55 percent) and Texas (54 percent).

In 2009, 61 percent of unauthorised immigrants were aged 25 to 44 years, and 58 percent were male. Males accounted for 62 percent of the illegal population in the 18 to 34 age group in 2009 while females accounted for 52 percent of the 45 and older age groups.



Read more: Indian illegal immigrants in US up 64 percent last decade - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/indians-abroad/Indian-illegal-immigrants-in-US-up-64-percent-last-decade/articleshow/5554881.cms#ixzz1Cfty49sl

Riaz Haq said...

The jobs stolen by Indian and other foreign IT firms to hire code coolies in their country have cost the US middle class many many trillions of dollars and decimated their std of living in America.

Even Andy Grove, former Intel CEO, believes outsourcing has been a disaster for America:

Such evidence stares at us from the performance of several Asian countries in the past few decades. These countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal. The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations. In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent-shattering economic performances over the '70s and '80s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries.

And:


However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs -- we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.


http://www.drudge.com/archive/136003/intel-exec-outsourcing-national-suicide

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an NPR report on the abuse of H1b visas:

If you scroll through the government's visa data, you notice something surprising. The biggest employer of foreign tech workers is not Microsoft — not by a long shot. Nor is it Google, Facebook or any other name-brand tech company. The biggest users of H-1Bs are consulting companies, or as Ron Hira calls them, "offshore-outsourcing firms."

"The top 10 recipients in [the] last fiscal year were all offshore-outsourcers. And they got 40,000 of the 85,000 visas — which is astonishing," he says.

Hira's a professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He's also the son of Indian immigrants and has a personal interest in questions of labor flow across borders.

For the past decade, he's been studying how consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas.

"What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore," he says. "And also to bring in on-site workers who are cheaper on the H-1B and undercut American workers right here."

The biggest user of H-1B last year was Cognizant, a firm based in New Jersey. The company got 9,000 new visas. Following close behind were Infosys, Wipro and Tata ‑‑ all Indian firms. They're not household names, but they loom large in tech places like the Seattle suburbs.

Cutting Costs

Rennie Sawade, a software designer with 30 years of experience, grew up in Michigan — watching the decline of the auto industry. And so, he went into computers in search of a more secure career. But that's not how it turned out.

"Basically, what I see is, it's happening all over again," Sawade says.

Programmers like him tend to be freelancers, or contract workers, and the big consulting firms are the competition. Sawade remembers when he almost landed a plum job at Microsoft.

"I remember having phone interviews and talking with the manager, having him sound really excited about my experience and he was going to bring me in to meet the team," Sawade recalls.

And then: nothing. He called his own placement agency to find out what happened.

"And that's when they told me, 'Oh, they hired somebody from Tata Consultancy.' And they actually told me on the phone, the woman I was talking to said her jaw just dropped when they found out how little Microsoft was paying this person from Tata Consultancy to do this job," he says.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134694/Whos-Hiring-H1-B-Visa-Workers-Its-Not-Who-You-Might-Think

Riaz Haq said...

WASHINGTON: Indians constitute four per cent of the total illegal immigrants living in the US, a country where the overall unauthorized immigrant population has remained unchanged since 2009, a latest report has said.

According to a report by Pew Research, more than 450,000 unauthorized Indian immigrants live in the US, constituting four per cent of the total illegal immigrants in the country.

The estimated figures are of the year 2012, the report said yesterday.

There was considerable decline in the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico between 2009 and 2012, but the overall number of 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants living in the US in 2012, remained unchanged from 2009.

Indian are the largest unauthorized immigrants in New Hampshire.

While the Indian illegal immigrants comprise second largest population in Indiana with four per cent, the percentages in other states were Michigan (14 per cent), Minnesota (nine per cent), New Jersey (11 per cent), Ohio (11 per cent), Pennsylvania (11 per cent) and Washington (five per cent), the report said.

Indians were the third largest unauthorized immigrants in Alaska (four per cent), Arizona (two per cent), Delaware (seven per cent), Illinois (five per cent), Kansas (five per cent), Massachusetts (ten per cent), Missouri (nine per cent)and Oregon (two per cent).

Although the US population of unauthorized immigrants was stable from 2009 to 2012, the number of Mexicans in this population fell by about half a million people during those years.

Unauthorized immigrant populations from South America and from a grouping of Europe and Canada held steady between 2009 and 2012, whereas it grew slightly from Asia, the Caribbean, Central America and the rest of the world for the same period.

Rounding out the top 10 in 2012 are China (300,000), the Philippines (200,000), South Korea (180,000), the Dominican Republic (170,000) and Colombia (150,000).

Five East Coast states were among those where the number of unauthorized immigrants grew were Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Numbers also rose in Idaho and Nebraska. Six Western states where the unauthorized immigrant populations declined were Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/450000-illegal-immigrants-in-US-are-from-India-Report/articleshow/45201279.cms

Riaz Haq said...

China was the country of origin for 147,000 recent U.S. immigrants in 2013, while Mexico sent just 125,000, according to a Census Bureau study by researcher Eric Jensen and others. India, with 129,000 immigrants, also topped Mexico, though the two countries’ results weren’t statistically different from each other.

For the study, presented last week at the Population Association of America conference in San Diego, researchers analyzed annual immigration data for 2000 to 2013 from the American Community Survey.

The mandatory annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau asks where respondents lived the year before. Researchers counted as an “immigrant” any foreign-born person in the U.S. who said they previously lived abroad, without asking about legal status. (So while the data include undocumented immigrants, it may undercount them.)

A year earlier, in 2012, Mexico and China had been basically tied for top-sending country—with Mexico at 125,000 and China at 124,000.

It isn’t just China and India. Several of the top immigrant-sending countries in 2013 were from Asia, including South Korea, the Philippines and Japan.

For a decade, immigration from China and India, which boast the world’s largest populations, has been rising as increasing numbers move to the U.S. to study, work and unite with families already in the country.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/immigrants-to-u-s-from-china-top-those-from-mexico-1430699284?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=%2AAfPak%20Daily%20Brief&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign

Riaz Haq said...

Indian agents involved in smuggling people into the US for the 'Big American Dream' have found a new route.
A confidential government report reveals that illegal immigrants from India are now being taken to the US via Haiti, instead of the earlier Guatemala-Mexico route.
Till 2012, agents in India used to route illegal migrants to the US via Guatemala, from where they tried to cross the border to reach Mexico and then into US.

Indian agents involved in smuggling people into the US for the 'Big American Dream' have found a new route.
A confidential government report reveals that illegal immigrants from India are now being taken to the US via Haiti, instead of the earlier Guatemala-Mexico route.
Till 2012, agents in India used to route illegal migrants to the US via Guatemala, from where they tried to cross the border to reach Mexico and then into US.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2610643/Haiti-emerges-new-illegal-port-entry-US-Indian-emigrants.html#ixzz3ZYlPbwn4
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Riaz Haq said...

BBC News - ‪#‎Indians‬ pray at ‪#‎visa‬ temples to go abroad. Why are #Indians escaping ‪#‎india‬ by millions? ‪#‎EXODUS‬

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33161672


Millions of Indians regularly visit temples and religious sites to pray and seek divine help in fulfilling their wishes.
Most pray for a child or well being of their loved ones, but in recent years, some unusual temples have come up, including a few that offer divine help in procuring a visa.

Riaz Haq said...

Divine Intervention? #Indians Seek Help From the 'Visa God' #India #visas #Exodus http://on.wsj.com/1AB8bqF via @WSJ


Divine Intervention? Indians Seek Help From the 'Visa God'

Priest Says Prayers May Aid Those Trying to Enter U.S.; A Job With Amazon.com


Lord Balaji is one of the most-worshiped local incarnations of the Hindu Lord Vishnu. His adherents flock to his many temples to pray for things like happiness, prosperity and fertility.

Lately, the deity has grown particularly popular at the once-quiet Chilkur Balaji temple here, where he goes by a new nickname: the Visa God. The temple draws 100,000 visitors a week, many of whom come to pray to Lord Balaji for visas to travel or move to the U.S. and other Western countries.

Mohanty Dolagobinda is one of the Visa God's believers. Three years ago, a U.S. consulting company applied for a visa on his behalf. It was rejected. When the company tried again the following year, Mr. Dolagobinda's friends told him to visit the Chilkur Balaji temple ahead of his interview at the U.S. consulate. Weeks later, he sailed through the interview. "I've never heard of anyone who's gone to the temple whose visa got rejected," says Mr. Dolagobinda.

In the late 1990s, this small temple on the outskirts of Hyderabad -- the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh -- drew just two or three visitors a week.

C.S. Gopala Krishna, the 63-year-old head priest of the Chilkur Balaji Temple, wanted more people to come. So he gave Lord Balaji a new identity. "I named him the Visa God," he says. Now, Mr. Gopala Krishna's temple is a hot spot. Billboards on the dirt road to the temple advertise English-language schools and visa advisers. Next to the parking lot, vendors hawk souvenirs and fruit.

The Visa God's growing celebrity reflects the rising frustration of educated Indians hoping to move West. In recent years, it's become harder to win the employer-sponsored "H-1B" visas that let skilled professionals like engineers work in the U.S. While the U.S. limits the number of H-1Bs granted each year to 65,000, the demand for visas keeps rising.


For the fiscal year ended September 2004, it took 11 months for the U.S. government to receive 65,000 applications for H-1B visas; last fiscal year, it took two months. This fiscal year, the U.S. government received more than 65,000 applications in one day. Applications are now assigned a random number, and the first 90,000 to 110,000 are processed and accepted or rejected until the quota is reached.

Riaz Haq said...

Toys ‘R’ Us Brings Temporary H1B Workers From #India to U.S. to Move Jobs Overseas. . #outsourcing http://nyti.ms/1PNxnyi

When Congress designed temporary work visa programs, the idea was to bring in foreigners with specialized, hard-to-find skills who would help American companies grow, creating jobs to expand the economy. Now, though, some companies are bringing in workers on those visas to help move jobs out of the country.

For four weeks this spring, a young woman from India on a temporary visa sat elbow to elbow with an American accountant in a snug cubicle at the headquarters of Toys “R” Us here. The woman, an employee of a giant outsourcing company in India hired by Toys “R” Us, studied and recorded the accountant’s every keystroke, taking screen shots of her computer and detailed notes on how she issued payments for toys sold in the company’s megastores.

“She just pulled up a chair in front of my computer,” said the accountant, 49, who had worked for the company for more than 15 years. “She shadowed me everywhere, even to the ladies’ room.”

Continue reading the main story
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By late June, eight workers from the outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS, had produced intricate manuals for the jobs of 67 people, mainly in accounting. They then returned to India to train TCS workers to take over and perform those jobs there. The Toys “R” Us employees in New Jersey, many of whom had been at the company more than a decade, were laid off.

A temporary visa program known as H-1B allows American employers to hire foreign professionals with college degrees and “highly specialized knowledge,” mainly in science and technology, to meet their needs for particular skills. Employers, according to the federal guidelines, must sign a declaration that the foreign workers “will not adversely affect the working conditions” of Americans or lower their wages.

In recent years, however, global outsourcing and consulting firms have obtained thousands of temporary visas to bring in foreign workers who have taken over jobs that had been held by American workers. The Labor Department has opened an investigation of possible visa violations by contractors at the Walt Disney Company and at Southern California Edison, where immigrants replaced Americans in jobs they were doing in this country. Four former workers at Disney have filed discrimination complaints against the company. The companies say they have complied with all applicable laws.

Riaz Haq said...

2 #Indian owned #SiliconValley body shops fined for underpaying H1B visa workers from #India http://www.theindianpanorama.news/potpourri/business/2-silicon-valley-companies-owned-by-indian-americans-have-been-penalised-for-violating-h1b-visa-rules-article-52750.html … via @theindpanorama

Scopus Consulting Group and Orian Engineers, two companies based in Silicon Valley and owned by an Indian-American Kishore Kumar have been ordered to pay fines of $103,000 to the federal government. Along with this, the company is required to pay $84,000 in back wages to its employees who are carrying H-1B visas.

The two companies bring workers from India and other countries on H1B visas to employ them as software engineers for Silicon Valley firms such as eBay, Apple and Cisco Systems.

During investigations, US Department of Labor Wage and Hour investigators found that the two companies violated the H1B provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act by misrepresenting the prevailing wage level on the Labor Condition Applications required by the act, an official release said yesterday.Federal Administrative Law Judge Stephen R Henley ordered the two businesses owned by Kishore Kumar to pay 21 workers $84,000 in back wages and $103,000 in fines to the federal government.

“Some of the country’s most cutting-edge, successful organisations benefit from underpaid H-1B workers,” director for the Wage and Hour Division in San Francisco, Susana Blanco said.

“H1B workers must be paid local prevailing wages. We will not allow companies to undercut local wages and hurt US workers and businesses who pay their workers fairly,” Blanco said.

Riaz Haq said...

India Is the Fastest-Growing Source of New Illegal Immigrants to the U.S.
The country ranks fourth after Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala for the largest source of unauthorized migrants to America
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2016/09/22/india-is-the-fastest-growing-source-of-new-illegal-immigrants-to-the-u-s/?mod=e2fb


a growing number of Indians that are less-skilled and staying in the country illegally. In fact, in recent years the net number of Indians staying in America illegally has been growing much more than even the number of new illegal Mexico-born immigrants in the country, a recent Pew Research Center report showed this week.

Of course the total number of unauthorized Mexicans in the United States is more than ten times higher than the number of Indians but most of them arrived more than a decade ago. The total for illegal immigrants born in Mexico has been shrinking while the total from India has been growing more than any other country.

In the period between 2009 and 2014, Pew estimates, the number of unauthorized Indian immigrants in the U.S. surged by 43% to a total of around 500,000. During the same period, the number of unauthorized Mexicans fell 8% to 5.85 million.

India now ranks fourth after Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala in terms of the countries that are the largest source of unauthorized migrants to America.

Despite concerns of the U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and his followers that a flood of illegal immigrants are hurting America, the number of illegals has actually been falling for years. However the steady decline of the number of illegal immigrants from Latin America has been partly offset by those arriving from Asia, led by India.

“The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population – 11.1 million in 2014 – has stabilized since the end of the Great Recession, as the number from Mexico declined but the total from other regions of the world increased,” the report said.

If you combine legal and illegal arrivals, both India and China are each sending more people to the United States in recent years. In 2014 about 136,000 people came to the U.S. from India, about 128,000 from China and about 123,000 from Mexico, census figures show. As recently as 2005, Mexico sent more than 10 times as many people to the U.S. as China, and more than six times as many as India.


Riaz Haq said...

The Patel family, who froze to death while trying to illegally enter the #US from the #Canadian border, hailed from the Dingucha village in #Gujarat, #India , which has a long history of its residents trying to sneak into #America, no matter what the cost

https://thewire.in/world/the-gujarati-family-that-froze-to-death-in-search-of-the-american-dream


Despite constant humiliation, deportation and even the loss of life, more and more Gujaratis are willing to undertake dangerous practises to reach the United States and get a shot at that elusive ‘American dream’. Now, one family from a nondescript village in the state has even frozen to death.

The family, which included a three-year-old child, died whilst being trafficked across the border into the US from Canada. What’s more, another such family is thought to be missing.

The family hailed from Dingucha village, some 12 kilometre from the Gujarat’s capital Gandhinagar, with a registered population of 3,000 people. Most of residents of this village give a wry, proud smile when they say, “More than 1,800 people from our village, the majority, live in America.”

Every house in Dingucha is replete with Costco candy and jalepeño wafers. Locals from the Patel-dominated area take pride in the fact that people from there began migrating to America from the early 70s, “when there were no issues,” as an older resident of the village said.

The death of the family is very sad, the residents of Dingucha said, noting that they will find the agent who promised a “first-class human smuggling exercise” and had charged them Rs 65 lakh to do so. They are trying to get in touch over the phone with the relatives of a family in the village which was part of another group trying to make their way into the US.


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Last year, a 24-year-old man from North Gujarat’s Mehsana district decided to leave the country with his family because he was being harassed by local politicians. With help from an agent, he reached the Mexican border. From there, they were joined by a local agent ferrying another group of people crossing the border illegally.

However, his dream of settling in the US was shattered and he and the others in the group were arrested by US border authorities and taken to a detention centre in Louisiana. The agent had reportedly been paid a whopping 30 lakh to get the family into the US.


Similarly, a few years ago, a woman from North India, along with her daughter, was trying to cross from Mexico into the US through the Arizona desert. After spending 22 hours in the scorching heat, both she and her daughter died.

In 2007, then BJP MP Babubhai Katara was even caught trying to illegally send a young woman to Canada on his wife’s diplomatic passport. A subsequent investigation had revealed that an amount of around Rs 30 lakh had been fixed to do so.

The Trump administration had begun building a wall along the US’s border with Mexico and since then, undocumented immigrants have been increasingly trying to enter from Canada. While the Mexican side of the border has a tropical climate similar to India’s, the Canadian border in the North has a harsh, freezing climate.

These instances raise another question: what could compel people to become so desperate to leave the country as to endanger their lives? Could government intervention to set up new schemes to promote start-ups or innovation help keep Indians within India?

This responsibility – to think of way to prevent such disasters by creating avenues for gainful employment and assure Indians of a bright future within their country – lies with the government.

Riaz Haq said...

Since the beginning of the 2022 fiscal year that started last October, a record 16,290 Indian citizens have been taken into US custody at the Mexican border. The previous high of 8,997 was recorded in 2018.

https://news.yahoo.com/us-immigration-why-indians-fleeing-231910481.html

Experts point to a number of reasons for the increase, including a climate of discrimination in India, an end to pandemic-era restrictions, a perception that the current US administration is welcoming to asylum seekers and the ramping-up of previously established smuggling networks.

While some migrants are coming to the US for economic reasons, many are fleeing persecution back home, said Deepak Ahluwalia, an immigration lawyer who has represented Indian nationals in Texas and California.

The latter group range from Muslims, Christians and "low-caste" Hindus to members of India's LGBT community who fear violence at the hands of extreme Hindu nationalists, or supporters of secessionist movements and farmers from the Punjab region, which has been shaken by protests since 2020.

Conditions for many of these groups have deteriorated in recent years, international observers say.

Immigrants such as Mr Singh often see the US as "the ultimate gateway" to a better life, said Mr Ahluwalia, the lawyer.

The enormous distances involved, however, make the trip to the US extremely challenging.

Traditionally, Indian migrants who arrive at the US-Mexican border use "door-to-door" smuggling services, with journeys arranged from India to South America. They are often guided the entire way and travel in small groups with their fellow countrymen who speak the same language, rather than individually or with only family members.

These networks often begin with India-based "travel agents" which outsource parts of the journey to partner criminal groups in Latin America.

Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the Washington DC-based Migration Policy Institute, said that the number of Indian migrants is also rising as a result of a "ripple effect" that takes place when those who have used these services successfully recommend them to friends or family back in India.

"It naturally expands and draws more migrants," she said. "Of course, that doesn't happen without migrants wanting to leave originally."

The experiences of Manpreet - a 20-year-old from Punjab who asked that only his first name be used - are typical of those who have taken the southern route in the past. A vocal critic of India's ruling BJP (Bharatiya Jannata Party), he fled the country after being persecuted for his political beliefs.

"From Ecuador I took a bus to Colombia, and from Colombia I took a bus to Panama," Manpreet recalled in an interview with the BBC from California. "From there, via a boat, I [went to] Nicaragua and Guatemala, and then Mexico and entered the US."

Even guided by seasoned smugglers, the trip to the border is often one that is fraught with dangers, including robberies and extortion at the hands of local gangs or corrupt authorities or extreme weather, injuries and illness.

These dangers were highlighted in 2019, when a 6-year-old Indian girl from Punjab was found dead in the scorching desert near the border town of Lukeville, Arizona - a case that made headlines in India. It was later reported that she died in temperatures of over 42 C (108 F) after her mother left her with a group of other Indians to go search for water.

Riaz Haq said...

3059 Indians held while attempting to enter US from Canada in September

https://www.newindiaabroad.com/news/3059-indians-held-while-attempting-to-enter-us-from-canada-in-september

Among those arrested were four unaccompanied children, four other children accompanied by family members.

In September of this year, a total of 8,076 individuals of Indian origin were apprehended by United States law enforcement agencies as they attempted to enter the country illegally through various routes. Notably, 3,059 of these individuals were detained at the U.S.-Canada border, according to data provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Indian arrests at the U.S.-Canada border mark the highest monthly total between October 2022 and September 2023.

According to The Times of India, a source said, “Many illegal immigrants, primarily from Gujarat, have either settled in Canada or are awaiting an opportunity to enter the US. In August, 2,327 illegal immigrants were caught trying to cross over to the US. This number rose to 3,059 in September.”

Among those arrested were four unaccompanied children, four other children accompanied by family members, and 530 children with their parents and siblings. Additionally, a total of 2,521 single adults were apprehended. It's worth noting that Indians attempting to enter the U.S. unlawfully typically do so via the U.S.-Mexico border. According to official data, between February 2019 and March of this year, U.S. law enforcement agencies arrested a total of 190,000 individuals of Indian origin.

Efforts by Indians to engage in illegal migration to the U.S. persist, even though there have been numerous tragic incidents in which several families lost their lives during these hazardous journeys.