According to a new estimate from US Customs and Border Protection, between October 2022 and September 2023, up to 96,917 Indians were apprehended trying to enter the country illegally.
Of the ninety-six,917 Indians, thirty-010 were found to have entered the US illegally through the border with Canada, forty-one,770 over the border with Mexico, and the remaining twenty-five,317 were arrested once they reached the US mainland. There has been a five-fold rise in comparison to the 2019–20 statistics.
Concurrently, there has been a rise in authorized foreign travel for either tourism or residency. Over two crore Indians choose to have their vacations abroad, according to the Ministry of Tourism’s annual report for 2022–2023.
Furthermore, there are currently over three crore Indians living abroad. Most people refer to these people as “Overseas Indians”. According to data from the Ministry of External Affairs, 3,21,00,340 persons are presently residing abroad. Of this number, 1,86,83,645 are Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) and 1,34,59,195 are Non-Resident Indians (NRI).
How are PIOs and NRIs different from one another?
The differences between NRIs and PIOs are clear to see: An NRI (Non-Resident Indian) is an Indian national with an Indian passport who resides abroad for employment, business, or other purposes. In contrast, a PIO (Person of Indian Origin) is a person with Indian ancestry who possesses a foreign passport but is not an Indian citizen. While NRIs continue to hold their Indian citizenship, PIOs are foreign nationals of Indian origin. In India, PIOs and NRIs do not share the same voting rights.
The data indicates that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), home to nearly 34 lakh people, has the highest density of non-resident Indians (NRIs), with Saudi Arabia (26 lakh) coming in second.
Surprisingly, the US tops the list of countries with PIOs (31.8 lakh), followed by Malaysia and Myanmar, which host 27.60 lakh and 20 lakh PIOs, respectively.
It is also important to note that PIO concentrations are high in South Africa, Fiji, Singapore, Guyana, Suriname, and Indonesia. This is the outcome of slavery or forced labor during the British Raj. They were brought to these locations mostly to labor on plantations. These are the folks who traveled there in search of a better future but never came back.