India Migration Report 2010–2011: The Americas (IMR 2010–2011) is a sequel to the India Migration Report 2009: Past, Present and the Future Outlook (IMR 2009). IMR 2010–2011 presents a picture of continuing migration between India and the North, South and Central Americas as well as the Caribbean. For more than half a century, India has been one of the largest source countries of migrants to the US and Canada. High-skill migrants, falling in various categories – professionals and technicians, students, and family migrants – have comprised the flows over time. The Indian population in these two countries exert considerable influence as diaspora groups. Quite a significant proportion of them are highly educated and affluent people who have attained important positions in the mainstream economic and socio-political set-up of the host country. Contrary to their position in North America, Indian migrants in South America and the Caribbean are not as highly skilled, educated or affluent. A majority of them had migrated much earlier as low-skilled workers recruited for plantations in the colonies. They formed the old diaspora in the Caribbean. In contrast, migration to the US and Canada led to formation of the new diaspora. This report is an attempt to trace Indian migration to the continents of North and South America and its different trajectories.

Migration of Indians to the Americas dates back to the nineteenth century when a large number of people migrated to the Caribbean as indentured labour. In North America, Indians arrived in 1890s, seeking work in lumber mills, railroads and agriculture, mainly in the west coast states of British Columbia in Canada, and Washington and California in the US. Major parts of this migration comprised unskilled and uneducated workers and remained largely unnoticed. It was the later waves of migration, comprising the highly skilled and educated, constituting the so-called brain-drain, which generated a lot of concern among the Indian public in general, and the academia and policy circles in particular.