Indians in UAE embrace change
NEW DELHI: In line with trends in global migration, a total of 2,240 Indians living in the UAE gave up their Indian citizenship in the last five years with the intention of permanently settling down in third countries when their stints of work get over in the Emirates.
According to statistics tabled yesterday before the Lok Sabha, the lower House of India’s Parliament, a grand total of 584,364 people changed their Indian nationality and embraced third country citizenship all over the world between January 2015 and October 2019. This did not mean that such Indians left the UAE as soon as they acquired new citizenship. Presumably, they waited for their work tenures in the Emirates to run its course and then migrated to countries whose nationality they embraced to settle there permanently.
The final decades of the last century and the new millennium have seen high levels of human migration, thanks to greater integration in the world, such as expansion to the European Union to include former socialist East bloc states and of the East Asian and Latin American nations through formal institutional structures.
India and the rest of South Asia have been slower to embrace such trends towards a global village. The statistics tabled in India’s Parliament yesterday suggests that this is changing.
The latest figures also may be the result of a shift in the pattern of emigration from India to the UAE and the rest of the Gulf in recent years, away from labourers. Qualified Indian professionals living in the UAE and the GCC states find it easier to permanently settle in third countries, especially developed ones like the US, Canada and Australia.
The number of Indians in GCC countries other than the UAE who changed their citizenship with the intention of permanently settling down in third countries in the last five years is 1,925.
Within the UAE, the break-up of such nationality change was 311 Indians in Abu Dhabi and 1,929 in rest of the Emirates.
V Muraleedharan, Minister of State for External Affairs, told Parliament that in the last 10 years 13.38 million Indians left the country to live abroad either temporarily for employment, as in the Gulf, or as immigrants on a permanent basis.