The United States is fast approaching the end of a long presidential campaign in which immigration has taken center stage.

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for failing to protect America’s borders, with Trump’s misleading claims that Ohio immigrants are eating people’s pets becoming one of the defining moments of the race so far. Harris, on the other hand, went on the offensive, accusing Trump of sabotaging a bipartisan Senate bill that would have strengthened border protections.

Amid this back-and-forth, relatively little attention has been paid to the changing makeup of exactly who is trying to enter the United States without prior authorization. As of 2020, India has become the country of origin for the largest number of migrants attempting to enter the United States from outside the Western Hemisphere.

A new analysis by the Niskanen Center summarizes what we know—and what we don’t—about this growth in India. The authors of this new paper, Gil Guerra and Sneha Puri, were featured guests last week on Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Guerra, Puri and host Milan Vaishnav discussed irregular migration data, the rise in Indian border encounters and the reasons behind the increase. In addition, the trio spoke about the similarities and differences between Chinese and Indian migration, the recent controversy surrounding Khalistani separatists in the diaspora, and the policy options facing the next US president.

As of October 2020, US Customs and Border Protection has encountered nearly 170,000 Indian migrants at both the southern and northern US land borders. As of 2021, the top three languages ​​spoken by Indian migrants (other than English) are Punjabi, Hindi and Gujarati, with Punjabi taking the lion’s share. Over the past four years, there have been nearly 86,000 encounters with Indian nationals at the southwest border — the most for an extra-hemispheric country, but still significantly fewer than some countries in Central and South America.

“One of the main obstacles in migrating across the Americas … is a piece of land called the Darien Gap in Panama, which is incredibly difficult to cross. It is essentially ungovernable in some patches. It’s often very dangerous, difficult and expensive to go through,” explained Guerra. “So for many migrants, especially those coming from outside the hemisphere, there is a very high premium for avoiding the Darien Gap because of all these obstacles.”

A series of administrative and visa changes by several governments in Central and South America has made it difficult for Indians to access these countries.

As a result, there has been a sharp increase in irregular Indian migration concentrated at the Canadian border, where Indian nationals make up the largest proportion of illegal migrants after Canadian migrants. But according to Puri, “In fiscal year 2024, there were actually more Indian citizens than Canadian citizens who immigrated illegally. There have been no indications or trends that this will decrease, at least in the foreseeable future.”

Puri explained that there are no countries in Central or South America that even come close to 1,000 a year, with the exception of Mexico.