Survey: A third of Indian-Americans want to return to India

Indian-Americans constitute about one per cent of the US population.

• Pramod Thomas
• 25 July, 2023

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By: Pramod Thomas

A new survey has revealed that 33 per cent of Indian-Americans are willing to return to their country of origin.

The survey by Pew Research Center thinktank published on Wednesday (19) added that 76 per cent of Indian -Americans hold a favorable opinion of India, with 51 per cent of these holding a ‘very favorable’ view.

According to the survey, 86 percent of Indian-Americans hold a favorable opinion of the US, with only one per cent having a ‘very unfavorable’ opinion.

Among the 26 per cent of Asian-Americans respondents to the survey said that they would move to the homeland of their ancestors because of proximity to friends or family (36 per cent) and a lower cost of living (22 per cent).

Smaller shares also pointed to greater familiarity with the culture, better support for older people and feeling safer there as reasons.

Half of Indian adults who responded said they would move to India would do so because of its lower cost of living (52 per cent).

The interest in moving to their homelands is lower among immigrants who have been in the US for a longer time.

A total of 7,006 Asian-American adults took part in the survey, of which only 33 per cent had favourable views on India. The opinion on China was predominantly negative.

The survey found that Asian-Americans with higher levels of education often feel more positively about the places they were asked about than those with lower levels of formal schooling.

As many as 42 per cent of those with a postgraduate degree have favorable views of India, compared with 35 per cent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 27 per cent of those with less formal schooling. The pattern is reversed, though, when it comes to China.

Half of the respondents (53 per cent) stated that the US will continue to be the world’s leading economic power. However, only 4 per cent believed that India would be the leading economic power over the next decade.

The main ethnicities that the survey examined were Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Together these seven groups account for 81 per cent of all Asian-American adults.