WASHINGTON: The next time you hear Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, rail against illegal immigrants, he would most certainly mean Mexicans, as he has, but he could be referring to those from India as well.
India has emerged as the fastest growing source of illegal immigrants to the US, up by between 43% and 37% from 2009 to 2014, according to a new study by Pew, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
It ranked fourth after Mexico, Salvador and Guatemala, and above Honduras in the top five “birth countries” of “unauthorised immigrants”, as the Pew preferred to call them.
No other country came anywhere near India. Mexico, Trump’s pet peeve, was down by half a million over the same period.
The study assigned no reasons for the spike for India, which, it added, was in the top five even in 2005.
The overall number of illegal immigrants in the US — 11.1 million as of 2014 — has stabilised since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, that was taken as the cut-off year for the study, which said the number of unauthorised immigrants rose through the 1990s and early 2000s, peaking at 12.2 million in 2007. It declined in 2008 and 2009.
There has been, in fact, a decline in the number of those coming from Mexico, the largest source of illegal immigrants and a constant target of Trump’s, from 6.3 million to 5.8 million.
{{/usCountry}}There has been, in fact, a decline in the number of those coming from Mexico, the largest source of illegal immigrants and a constant target of Trump’s, from 6.3 million to 5.8 million.
{{/usCountry}}The Republican nominee has yet to acknowledge that and never will, having turned it into a key issue of his campaign.
This might be because Mexico continues, however, to be the source of the largest chunk of illegal immigrants living in the US — which is different from fresh in-flow — accounting for more than half of them, at 52%.