Here’s some news that will likely not shock you. India is the top country of origin of international migrants, with 15.6 million migrants (1.56 crore), followed by Mexico, Russia, China and Bangladesh. This was revealed in a study conducted by Pew Research Centre.
This year, migration was one of the key points of discussion in many countries and was even the basis of a platform used by the UKIP in the Brexit vote and Donald Trump in the US presidential election, among other cases. But where 2016 was the year that millions of refugees migrated from Syria and other neighbouring war-torn countries into Europe, the study covered not just refugees but economic migrants as well. America and the UAE, for example, two of the regions where the larger number of Indian migrants have settled down, offer a better standard of living.
Indian migrants have been moving out of the country and into other countries for decades. While doing so is not wrong, it remains to be seen what India with its growing economy can do now to not only retain the talent that we possess in the country, but perhaps also offer incentives for those who migrated to come back and enrich us with their knowledge. That is the bigger challenge.
