Indians are third largest immigrant group in US

Washington: Indians are the third-largest immigrant group in the US behind Mexicans and the Chinese with their number touching nearly 1.9 million in 2011, according to a US think tank.

Indian population has grown to over 150 times its size since 1960, when the slightly more than 12,000 Indian immigrants represented less than 0.5 percent of the total immigrant population of 9.7 million immigrants.

As a group, immigrants from India are better educated, more likely to have strong English language skills and arrive on employment-based visas, and are less likely to live below the federal poverty line than the overall foreign-born population, it says.

Based on data from various US government reports, the article noted that Almost one-third of all Indian immigrants resided in just two states:

In terms of share of cities’ respective immigrant populations, the Indian born made up 15 percent of all immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey; 14 percent in Richmond, Virginia and 14 percent in Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina.

According to the Institute of International Education, students from India accounted for 13 percent (100,270) of the 764,495 international students studying at US institutions of higher learning during the 2011-12 academic year.

India was the second largest origin country of international students in the United States, behind China (25 percent of international students in the United States).

More than 29 percent of employed Indian-born men worked in information technology occupations, while 19 percent of employed Indian-born women worked in management, business, and finance.

The top three occupations that employed Indian-born men ages 16 and older were information technology (29 percent of all 717,000 Indian male workers); management, business, and finance (21 percent); and sales (11 percent).