page_title: Non-resident Indian and person of Indian origin
section_title: United States of America
hierarchical_section_title: Non-resident Indian and person of Indian origin / Diaspora by host country / North America / United States of America
caption_attribution_description: Kalpana Chawla, American astronaut who died during the failed re-entry of Space Shuttle Columbia.
context_page_description: Overseas Indians, officially known as Non-Resident Indians or Persons of Indian Origin, are people of Indian birth, descent or origin who live outside the Republic of India. According to a Ministry of External Affairs report, there are 32 million NRIs and PIOs residing outside India. India remains the largest country of origin for expatriates and immigrant communities with a 55 million-strong diaspora across the world, including the Romani people.
context_section_description: The United States has the largest Indian population in the world outside Asia. Indian immigration to North America started as early as the 1890s. Emigration to the US also started in the late 19th and early 20th century, when Sikhs arriving in Vancouver found that the fact that they were subjects of the British Empire did not mean anything in Canada itself, and they were blatantly discriminated against.Some of these pioneers entered the US or landed in Seattle and San Francisco as the ships that carried them from Asia often stopped at these ports. Most of these immigrants were Sikhs from the Punjab region.
  Asian women were restricted from immigrating, because the US government passed laws in 1917, at the behest of California and other states in the west, which had experienced a large influx of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants during and after the gold rush. As a result, many of the South Asian men in California married Mexican women. A fair number of these families settled in the Central Valley in California as farmers, and continue to this day. These early immigrants were denied voting rights, family re-unification and citizenship. In 1923 the Supreme Court of the United States, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, ruled that people from India (at the time, British India, e.g. South Asians) were ineligible for citizenship. Bhagat Singh Thind was a Sikh from India who settled in Oregon; he had applied earlier for citizenship and was rejected there. Thind became a citizen a few years later in New York.
  After World War II, US immigration policy changed, after almost a half century, to allow family re-unification for people of non-white origin. In addition, Asians were allowed to become citizens and to vote. Many men who arrived before the 1940s were finally able to bring their families to the US; most of them in this earlier era settled in California and other west coast states.
  Another wave of Indian immigrants entered the US after independence of India. A large proportion of them were Sikhs joining their family members under the new more (though not completely) colour-blind immigration laws, then Malayali immigrants from Middle East, Kerala, etc. and professionals or students that came from all over India. The Cold War created a need for engineers in the defence and aerospace industries, some of whom came from India. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, large numbers of Gujarati, Telugu, and Tamil people had settled in the US. The most recent and probably the largest wave of immigration to date occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the internet boom. As a result, Indians in the US are now one of the largest among the groups of immigrants with an estimated population of about 3.2 million, or ~1.0% of the US population according to American Community Survey of 2010 data. The demographics of Indian Americans have accordingly changed from majority Sikh to majority Hindu, with Sikhs only comprising 10% to 20% of Indian Americans today. This is much smaller than the proportion of Sikhs amongst the Indian populations in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but larger than in India. In 2018, with 25% population of all non-resident migrants in USA the Indians comprised the highest number of non-resident migrants (those without USA citizenship or greencard). The US Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with the indigenous peoples of the Americas commonly referred to as American Indians.
  In contrast to the earliest groups of Indians who entered the US workforce as taxi drivers, labourers, farmers or small business owners, the later arrivals often came as professionals or completed graduate study in the US and moved into the professions. They have become very successful financially thanks to the highly technical industries, and are thus probably the most well-off community of immigrants. They are well represented in all walks of life, but particularly so in academia, information technology and medicine. There were over 4,000 PIO professors and 84,000 Indian-born students 
caption: Kalpana Chawla is the first Indian American astronaut.
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