Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People

7. Across the Pacific Again: South Asian Immigrants

Across the Pacific Again South Asian Immigrants The renewed non-European immigration also included South Asians, who had come in small numbers before World War II. The Asian Indian migration flow began with legislation in 1946 that permitted the entry of 100 Indian immigrants yearly and granted them the right to naturalization . Two decades later the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 gave India the same number as other nations—20,000, not counting immediate family members of U.S. citizens. In 1990 the allotment was increased slightly for all countries. While in the 1940s only 1,761 Indians came to America, by the end of the twentieth century India had become one of the largest source nations for new American immigrants. From 1994 to 1998, a total of 189,081 Indian immigrants arrived, making India fourth, after Mexico , the Philippines, and China, and by the late 1990s Indian immigration averaged about 40,000 annually; in 2001 it reached a high of 65,916. Only Mexico sent more immigrants to the United States in that year.1 The census of 2000 counted more than 1.7 million Indians in the United States, and given the immigration figures for the 1990s, the number was sure to grow during the first decade of the twenty-first century.2 The Immigration and Naturalization Service reports differed from the census total because their immigration figures do not consider the fact that many Indians migrated from areas outside of India, such as Trinidad, Guyana, or England. Those entering from the Caribbean were descendants of the first wave of Indian immigrants who had been recruited as laborers in the nineteenth century. For example, Dayanand Bhagwandin, the first Indian to run for political office in New York City, was born in Guyana. In 1998 Guyana-born Michael Duvalle and England-born Faisal Sipra also ran unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly. All three were Republicans .3 Just before Memorial Day, 2003, some 50,000 Indians showed up in New York City to celebrate Phagwah, a traditional Hindu holiday. Those participating hailed from Guyana and were mostly Indian Hindus.4 7 186 Still other Asian Indians were expelled from Africa when Uganda’s Idi Amin ordered the confiscation of Asian property in the 1970s. Most of the Ugandan Indians migrated to Canada and Great Britain. Only a few came directly to the United States, though some later settled in America. In the 1980s and 1990s about 7 percent of African immigrants heading for the United States were Asians. Settlement for some required second or even third moves. Little India reported of one such family’s migration. First the Manu Lal family migrated from India to Afghanistan; when that country exploded in violence, they fled to Germany and finally to America . Another migrant, Ravina Advani, traveled from India to Hong Kong and from there to Sierra Leone. From Sierra Leone he finally came to America. Another family migrated from Kenya to England and finally the United States.5 The flight from England to the United States was not unusual because substantial numbers of these immigrants came to the United Kingdom, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, and some then immigrated to the United States. Overall the second half of the twentieth century witnessed an Indian diaspora even greater than that of the nineteenth century. As the twentieth century came to an end, an estimated 18 million Indians lived outside their original homeland.6 Although the number of undocumented Indian immigrants is unknown, most experts do not believe that figure is large. Transnational Indians sometimes worked temporarily before moving on to the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. For example, many Asian Indians worked for months in nations such as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates before relocating to the United States. By and large Middle Eastern nations did not welcome Asians other than as temporary workers. Thus some Indians coming to America might have brothers, sisters , or other family members residing temporarily in the Middle East as well as kin in Canada and/or Great Britain.7 The movement of Indians to the United States was vastly larger than the number at the turn of the twentieth century, and the social and economic composition of the latest Asian Indian immigrants was considerably different as well. Although uneducated Sikh men dominated the first wave of immigration, the post–World War II migration was made up of families, with women and children becoming the majority, and most...