Mokhasan doesn’t fit the mold of an average village in rural India. There’s a new local council building, opulent Hindu temples and paved roads. The primary school recently received a donation of $90,000. But despite these modern amenities, the streets are largely silent. Most houses are padlocked, their yards unkempt. Neighboring villages in the western state of Gujarat, one of India’s wealthiest, are also ghost towns, emptied of residents who migrated to countries such as the US.
“Everyone goes to the US to make money, and most of that money comes back to India,” says Jayesh Patel, whose entire family left the country. Patel, who runs a water bottling plant in Gujarat’s capital, Ahmedabad, frequently visits his native village to watch over the family’s land. “Everything here—the roads, temples, schools—it all comes from dollars.”
For years, money from diasporas globally has powered developing countries like India, where many villages are almost entirely dependent on remittances from abroad. The South Asian nation is the largest recipient of such funds, collecting nearly $120 billion last fiscal year, or the equivalent of the government’s annual spending on infrastructure.
But as US President Donald Trump and leaders in other wealthy nations crack down on immigration, this crucial pipeline of cash is now at risk of dwindling. Remittances total more than $800 billion globally. They are the second-biggest source of external funding to the developing world, be they from South Asian construction workers in Dubai, Mexican farm laborers in the US or Filipino nannies in Hong Kong. They account for close to a 10th of gross domestic product in the Philippines and Pakistan.
The US is the largest source of remittances worldwide. It’s common for Indian migrants to send roughly a fifth of their income back home, depending on their family situation, according to estimates from Devesh Kapur, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who focuses on the diaspora.
{snip}
For many Indians, intensifying scrutiny of skilled visas such as H-1B could also have an impact. Undocumented workers remit a higher proportion of their paychecks, yet the majority of money flowing to India comes from legal and often well-paid immigrants, according to Kapur. {snip}
“The American dream is turning into an American nightmare,” says Prasad Thotakura, president of the Indian American Friendship Council in Dallas, which seeks to educate members of Congress about the diaspora.
{snip}
The post India Risks Losing a $120 Billion Lifeline as US Curbs Migration appeared first on American Renaissance.
