Pew Research | Christians, Muslims have migrated out of India in droves

India, the world’s most populous country, also had the most people moving to other countries in 2020. 

An estimated 18.6 million Indian-born people live abroad, almost three times as many as in 1990, according to a new analysis based on UN data, censuses, and surveys.

The Religious Composition of the World’s Migrants report by the US-based Pew Research Center says the number of migrants originating from India outnumbers migrants living in India by almost four-to-one.

Community-wise figures

The report offers a comparison between the percentage of people of each religious community who have migrated to other nations, and the percentage of population they form within India.

The numbers suggest that Christians and Muslims are far more likely than Hindus to migrate out of India. “The religious mix of migrants who have left India is very different from the religious composition of the country at large, as of 2020," says the Pew report.

While Hindus form 79 per cent of India's population, they form 41 per cent of the population migrating out of India. On the other hand, Muslims form around 15 per cent of the Indian population, but constitute 33 per cent of the migrants from India.

The contrast is even sharper in the case of Christians. They form around 2per cent of the nation's population, but form 16 per cent of the migrating population from the country. 

More likely to leave

According to a lead researcher of the report, “many more” Muslims and Christians have left India than have moved in. “Many more Muslims and Christians have left India than have moved there. People of other, smaller religions, like Sikhs and Jains, are also disproportionately likely to have left India,” Stephanie Kramer, a lead researcher of the analysis, was quoted as saying in a BBC report.

“In recent decades, violent attacks on religious minorities, including Muslims and Christians, have been associated with a rising tide of Hindu nationalism in India,” the Pew report said while not linking it to the emigration. 

Muslim migration trends

"Like migrants as a whole – who gravitate to places that offer safety and better economic conditions – Muslim migrants often leave their birth countries to escape poverty and danger," says the Pew report.

Seen in this light, the massive emigration of Muslims from India is telling. 

India is the second-most common country of origin among Muslim migrants, with 6 million living abroad. On the list of top 10 countries from which Muslims have moved out, India comes next only to war-torn Syria.

Eight per cent of the global Muslim migrants are from India, with Syria at the top with 8.1 million (10 per cent), as per the report.

“They (Muslims) are much more likely than people in the country’s Hindu majority to emigrate. Although India’s population is only 15 per cent Muslim, an estimated 33 per cent of all India-born migrants are Muslim,” it said.

Most Muslim migrants from India live in Muslim-majority countries with job opportunities, including the UAE (1.8 million), Saudi Arabia (1.3 million) and Oman (720,000), as per UN data.

Christian migration trends 

Christian migrants tend to land from countries that have Christian majorities and weaker economies than their neighbours, says the report.

Topping the list of nations from which migrants move out is Mexico. The Pew report says: "Mexico is the most common country of origin for Christian migrants (11.3 million), accounting for 9 per cent of the world’s Christian migrants." 

India comes eighth on this list, at 3.1 million Christian emigrants. 

"India is one of many countries in which emigrants disproportionately come from a religious minority," says the Pew report. "Christians make up 2 per cent of India’s population but an estimated 16 per cent of all the people who were born in India and now reside elsewhere."

The top five destinations for Christian migrants were the US, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.  

(Data for all the charts have been sourced from Pew Research Center.)

Read Part 1 | 5 Islamic nations among top 10 destinations of Hindu migrants