United Nations: India has the largest diaspora in the world

 The United Nations recently released the report “International Migration 2020 Highlights”. According to the report, the Indian diaspora is the largest in the world. More than 18 million people from India were living outside India as of 2020.

Key Findings of the report

• The other countries with large diaspora are Mexico, China, Russia and Syria.
• According to the report, India’s diaspora is distributed across a number of major countries such as UAE (3.5 million), Saudi Arabia (2.5 million) and US (2.7 million).
• The other countries hosting large number of migrants from India are Oman, Australia, Kuwait, Canada, Qatar, Pakistan and UK.
• Between 2000 and 2020, the size of migrant population has grown in all countries. During his period, India experienced the largest gain at nearly ten million. India was followed by Syria, Venezuela, China and Philippines. The countries where the migrant population increased during this period are Armenia, India, Ukraine, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ukraine.
• The migration of India was motivated by labour and family reasons.
• The United States was the largest country of destination of international migrants. There were more than 51 million migrants in the US as of 2020. This is equal to 18% of the total migration population of the world.
• The US was followed by Germany. Germany hosted the second largest migrants worldwide holding more than 16 million migration population. Germany was followed by Saudi Arabia, Russia and the UK.
• The COVID-19 has slowed down the growth in the stock of international migrants by around two million by mid-2020. This is 27% less than the growth expected since 2019.
• The growth in the number of international migrants has reached 281 million. It was 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. Currently, the total international migrants are about 3.6% of the world population.
• In terms of regional migration corridors, the central and southern Asia to Northern Africa and Western Asia grew the most. In these corridors the migrant population almost tripled between 2000 and 2020.