Why do many Indians Want to Immigrate to US?
This question started when I was having lunch with my India born colleagues, who complained about the long queue waiting for green cards, especially for Indians and Chinese nationals. I started ask question about why many Indians want to immigrate to US. To me, India seems to have everything going for her. It is a democratic society and one of fastest growing economies. We basically came up with two answers: higher social mobility and higher standard of living in US comparing to India.
Still I am not happy with simple answers. Can we prove them with data? Thus started my journey of researching in this topic. I have to forewarn you that this is more like a report in progress instead of a satisfactory exercise in data science. Nevertheless I learned a great deal about how to measure certain intangible things such as social mobility and standard of living.
First answer is that my Indian colleagues believe the US has higher social mobility. However, measurements for social mobility are difficult to come by. In fact, not many countries track them. You can find the study on US social mobility in this Economist article. However, studies in other countries are not available.
That leaves us with second possible answer, higher standard of living. Again though people talk about it, there is no one true measurement of it. The closest I can come up with is Human Development Index (HDI) published by United Nations, which is a composite statistics of life expectancy, education and income per capita. In my opinion, higher HDI implies higher standard of living. In 2013, 6.61% of immigrants were from India, which is near the 7% limit set by congress for any country. I added Ireland and Italy, which had large immigration populations in first half of last century for comparison. Both had negligible percentage in 2013.
Below are 2014 HDI rankings and indices for US, India, Ireland and Italy. US, Ireland and Italy has similar raw index number. In fact, all three countries are in the Very High Human Development category, while India is in Medium Human Development category. Clearly there is a huge gap between US and India, therefore in the eyes of Indians that US is a very desirable country to immigrate to.
Of course, a single statistics does not tell the whole story. There are many reasons that can’t be captured in data such as escaping political and religious prosecution, war, famine, and simply looking for a better life, After all, America is the land of opportunities.
Sources:
Data on immigration : Metrocosm
Human Development Index (HDI) : Human Development Reports by UN