India has largest diaspora population in the world: UN

India has the largest diaspora population in the world with 18 million people from the country living outside their homeland in 2020, according to a report by the United Nations, which says the UAE, the US and Saudi Arabia host the largest number of migrants from India.

The report ‘International Migration 2020 Highlights’, by the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) released on Friday, said the spatial distribution of transnational populations varies greatly and India’s diaspora, the largest in the world, is distributed across a number of major countries of destination.

In 2020, 18 million persons from India were living outside their country of birth. Other countries with a large diaspora population included Mexico and Russia (11 million each), China (10 million) and Syria (8 million). India’s large diaspora is distributed across the UAE (3.5 million), the US (2.7 million) and Saudi Arabia (2.5 million). Other countries hosting large numbers of Indian migrants included Australia, Canada, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar and the UK, the report said.

China and Russia also have spatially diffused diasporas. Between 2000 and 2020, the size of the migrant population abroad grew for nearly all countries and areas of the world.

India experienced the largest gain during that period at nearly 10 million, followed in order of magnitude by Syria, Venezuela, China and the Philippines. The US remained by far the largest country of destination of international migrants with 51 million migrants in 2020, equal to 18 per cent of the world’s total. Germany hosted the second largest number of migrants worldwide at around 16 million, followed by Saudi Arabia (13 million), Russia (12 million) and the UK (9 million).