India has a long history of migration. More than a century ago, large numbers of Indian migrants – many of them involuntary ones – moved to Africa, the Caribbean and within the Indian subcontinent itself. Some of the top destinations of Indian migrants in more recent decades include Persian Gulf countries, North America and Europe. Here are five facts about India and migration.
1India is the top source of international migrants, with one-in-twenty migrants worldwide born in India. As of 2015, 15.6 million people born in India were living in other countries. India has been among the world’s top origin countries of migrants since the United Nations started tracking migrant origins in 1990. The number of international Indian migrants has more than doubled over the past 25 years, growing about twice as fast as the world’s total migrant population.
(Use the interactive below to explore migration trends for India and other countries.)
Interactive: Origins and Destinations of International Migrants
Nearly half of India’s migrants are in just three countries: the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and the United States. About 3.5 million Indians live in the UAE, the top destination country for Indian migrants. Over the past two decades, millions of Indians have migrated there to find employment as laborers. Pakistan has the second-largest number of migrants, with 2 million.
Almost 2 million more live in the U.S., making up the country’s third-largest immigrant group. Among Indian Americans, nearly nine-in-ten were born in India. As a whole, Indian Americans are among the highest educated and have some of the highest income among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
There were 11.7 million immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S. in 2014, and about half of them were in the country illegally, according to Pew Research Center estimates. Mexico is the country’s largest source of immigrants, making up 28% of all U.S. immigrants.
With President Donald Trump’s administration taking steps to reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. — including through the construction of a wall at the southern border — here’s what we know about illegal immigration from Mexico:
1The number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. illegally has declined by more than 1 million since 2007. In 2014, 5.8 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico lived in the U.S., down from a peak of 6.9 million in 2007. Despite the drop, Mexicans still make up about half of the nation’s 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants (52% in 2014).
As Donald Trump and congressional Republicans take steps to roll back Obama-era financial regulations, the public remains divided over whether regulations of financial institutions have gone too far or not gone far enough.
Overall, about half of Americans (49%) say “the government has not gone far enough in regulating financial institutions and markets, leaving the country at risk of another financial crisis,” while 42% say the government has gone too far, “making it harder for the economy to grow.” These views are largely unchanged over the past several years.
By roughly two-to-one, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more likely to say financial regulations have gone too far (63%) than to say they have not gone far enough (31%). The balance of opinion among Democrats and Democratic leaners is reversed: More than twice as many Democrats say the government has not gone far enough in this area (62%) as say it has gone too far (29%). The partisan gap over financial regulation has changed little since Pew Research Center first asked the question in September 2013. Read More →
A real-time study asked more than 2,000 online news consumers twice a day over the course of a week (Feb. 24-March 1, 2016) whether they got news online in the past two hours and, if so, what their experience was with that news. Those who did get news online were asked whether they took one of six types of follow-up actions: speaking with someone either in person or over the phone; searching for additional information; posting, sharing or commenting on a social networking site; sending an article to someone by email or text message; bookmarking or saving the news for later; and commenting on a news organization’s webpage. Read More →
Only about half of the violent crimes and a third of the property crimes that occur in the United States each year are reported to police. And most of the crimes that are reported don’t result in the arrest, charging and prosecution of a suspect, according to government statistics.
In 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, 47% of the violent crimes and 35% of the property crimes tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics were reported to police. Those figures come from an annual BJS survey of 90,000 households, which asks Americans ages 12 and older whether they were victims of a crime in the past six months and, if so, whether they reported that crime to law enforcement or not.
Even when violent and property crimes are reported to police, they’re often not solved – at least based on a measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution. In 2015, 46% of the violent crimes and 19% of the property crimes reported to police in the U.S. were cleared, according to FBI data. Read More →
Pew Research Center regularly makes available the full datasets that underlie most of our reports. We typically do not publish the dataset at the same time as the report. That’s because it takes some time for us to complete all reporting for a given study and to clean and prepare the data for public release. The lag time varies by study, and some data (including surveys of certain populations, such as scientists or foreign policy experts) are never released, in order to protect respondent confidentiality. Survey data are cleaned to remove any information that could be used to identify individual respondents.
There are two ways to locate available datasets. You can go to this page and click on the research area in which you are interested. Or you can go to the research area’s page on the Center’s website, where you will find a “Datasets” or “Data and Resources” section with the available data listed in reverse chronological order by when the survey was fielded.
Topics: Research Methods
Prior to the Civil War, higher education opportunities were virtually nonexistent for nearly all black Americans. In the years following the war, more colleges sprang up to meet the educational needs of the newly freed black population. Congress defines a historically black college or university (HBCU) as a school “established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans.”
One of these institutions – Howard University – will celebrate its 150th anniversary on March 2. Founded in 1867, the Washington, D.C., university is not the oldest institution dedicated to educating black Americans, but it has become one of the largest historically black colleges in the nation.
Today, there are 101 HBCUs across the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands – roughly the same as in 1980, but down since the 1930s when there were 121 of these institutions, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Overall enrollment at these schools, including non-black students, has risen over the past several decades, albeit at a much slower rate than at universities overall. NCES figures show that in fall 2015, the combined total enrollment of all HBCUs was 293,000, compared with 234,000 in 1980. By comparison, enrollment at all universities and colleges nearly doubled during this time.
While most Americans disapprove of Donald Trump’s recent executive order that would prohibit refugees and travel from some Muslim-majority countries, a recent Pew Research Center survey finds a sizable divide on the issue among the country’s major religious groups.
Most Republicans support and most Democrats oppose the order, which would temporarily prohibit accepting new refugees from Syria into the U.S. and also prevent people (refugee or otherwise) from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
The partisan gap is mirrored by a religious one. About three-quarters of white evangelical Protestants (76%), most of whom identify with or lean toward the GOP, say they approve of the travel ban. In stark contrast, big majorities of black Protestants (84%) and religious “nones” (74%) – two strongly Democratic constituencies – disapprove of the executive order.
Topics: Immigration, Religion and Society, Religious Extremism, Immigration Trends, Religion and U.S. Politics, Religious Affiliation, Religious Beliefs and Practices, Catholics and Catholicism, Evangelical Protestants and Evangelicalism, Muslims and Islam, Migration, Religiously Unaffiliated
More than 1,800 refugees from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen have resettled in the U.S. since a federal court judge suspended key parts of an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Jan. 27 that restricted travel from these seven nations, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data. Virtually all of these refugees were admitted after a federal court judge suspended the president’s executive order.
Trump’s executive order suspended refugee admissions for 120 days, with the exception of persecuted religious minorities who would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. In addition, the order barred entry to the U.S. for 90 days for most people who hold citizenship from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Separately, admission of Syrian refugees was suspended pending a revision of security screening measures.
A week later, on Feb. 3, a federal judge in Washington State suspended key parts of Trump’s order, lifting the seven-country travel restrictions, a decision that was upheld by a federal appeals court. Trump is expected to issue a revised executive order next week that would reinstate travel restrictions but will also change who will be affected in order to address the legal concerns surrounding the first order. Read More →
As was the case throughout the presidential campaign, more Americans continue to oppose (62%) than favor (35%) building a wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico. And while President Donald Trump has said the U.S. would make Mexico pay for the wall, the public is broadly skeptical: 70% think the U.S. would ultimately pay for the wall, compared with just 16% who think Mexico would pay for it.
The proposal to build the wall was one of several contentious issues that loomed over a meeting between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Mexican officials this week to discuss immigration and border issues.