The Economist, en un artículo sin firma, a propósito de la creciente presencia de la inmigración indú en el mundo: publicado en la edición internacional este cuatro de abril de 2026, aunque el análisis está fechado en 12 de junio de 2023. Para el caso, la remisión a 2023 tiene poca importancia: sin duda, las cifras y tendencias analizadas, probablemente se han ampliado. The Economist pone el acento en la calidad de la inmigración, "bigger and more influential than any in history".
En principio, el volúmen de esa inmigración: en cifras de 2020, sobre un total de 281 millones de migrantes en el mundo, 18 millones son indios, 11,2 millones son mexicanos, y 10, 5 son chinos: correspondiente con su sobrepaso a China como país más poblado del mundo, también lo hace en migración directa, sin contar los migrantes de segunda y tercera generación.
En segundo lugar, la calidad de esa inmigración:
India has the essential ingredients to be a leading exporter of talent: a mass of young people and first-class higher education. Indians’ mastery of English, a legacy of British colonial rule, probably helps, too. Only 22% of Indian immigrants in America above the age of five say they have no more than a limited command of English, compared with 57% of Chinese immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute (mpi), an American think-tank.
(...) Since Indian independence in 1947 there have been several waves of migration to the rich world, enabling the diaspora to grow in number and might. The first, in the years following the second world war, involved low-skilled workers largely from the states of Gujarat and Punjab. A multitude went to Britain, which was facing acute labour shortages. They worked in tough places, such as textile mills and other industrial outfits. Many Indians whose families had moved to eastern Africa in the colonial period as indentured labourers later went west, too. America managed to attract a host of talented individuals by overhauling its immigration laws in 1965. Quotas that barred Indian nationals were out, new rules that favoured highly skilled migrants were in. Australia and Canada then followed suit with batches of similar regulations.
(...) Many of India’s best and brightest seem to prepare themselves to migrate. Arvind Subramanian, a former economic adviser to the Indian government, says that they are, in the economic jargon, “highly positively selected migrants”. Consider the findings of a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Development Economics by Prithwiraj Choudhury of Harvard Business School, Ina Ganguli of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Patrick Gaule of the University of Bristol. It analysed the results of students who took the highly competitive entrance exams for the Indian Institutes of Technology, the country’s elite engineering schools, in 2010. Eight years later, the researchers found that 36% of the 1,000 best performers had migrated abroad, rising to 62% among the 100 best. Most went to America.
(...) In America almost 80% of the Indian-born population over school age have at least an undergraduate degree, according to number-crunching by Jeanne Batalova at the mpi. Just 50% of the Chinese-born population and 30% of the total population can say the same. It is a similar story in Australia, where almost two-thirds of the Indian-born population over school age, half the Chinese-born and just one-third of the total population have a bachelor’s or higher degree.
Los migrantes indios son, de acuerdo a esto, mejor preparados, mejor pagados, y mejor establecidos en el mundo económico occidental: Indians are the highest-earning migrant group in America, with a median household income of almost $150,000 per year. That is double the national average and well ahead of Chinese migrants, with a median household income of over $95,000. Más aún, es frecuente que hoy dirijan las mayores empresas en Estados Unidos (Now Adobe, Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, IBM and Microsoft are all led by people of Indian descent. The deans at three of the five leading business schools, including Harvard Business School, are as well.)
Sin embargo, el artículo recuerda que la predisposición occidental por India, está amenazada desde el gobierno de Modi, por la sombra de un gobierno populista interesado en mantener una conexión con China, Rusia y los gobiernos asociados en el BRIC, que representan otro poder en el concierto mundial.
Por lo demás, las castas no han desaparecido, y bajo nuevas formas, siguen existiendo. Para los muy pobres también se abrió una puerta con la migración como mano de obra barata, a los países del sur de Asia, Africa, las monarquías àrabes y Australia.
Por mi propia observación directa, es evidente que también una clase media baja llega a Europa incluso, con pequeños emprendimientos personales que prosperan.
En fin, Oriente aprende rápido y particularmente India. Ya no es ni por asomo lo que fuera al terminar la segunda guerra mundial. India tiene su peso propio que jugará en el nuevo , Lejos del cine de James Ivory y Jean Renoir, también aquí ia India se hace su lugar.
La imagen, David Gil, en La sociedad Geográfica. (la ciudad de Delhi)
