The Indian Diaspora in the United States

Abstract

Although the overwhelming majority of the nearly one million persons of Indian birth or ancestry presently in the United States have either come in the last quarter century or are the children of those immigrants, the Indian presence there stretches back to nineteenth-century pioneer precursors.¹ Unlike the other major stream of Indian migrants to the New World which brought large numbers of indentured labourers to the circum-Caribbean, all of those who came to the United States (and Canada²). came as free persons.³ No Indians are known to have been recruited by North American employers. By the early twentieth century, when Indian labourers first began to arrive in British Columbia and the American West Coast, the major labour recruitment phase of Asian immigration to North America had ended. That phase had brought hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese workers to the mainland and Hawaii and provoked an anti-Asian movement which eventually all but halted the immigration of Asians to both the United States and Canada for several decades.⁴ Although Indians had not participated in the labour migration to North America which produced the nativist anti-Asian legislation, they suffered under it during the decades of little or no migration when Indians, along with other Asians, were ineligible for naturalization and denied other basic civil rights.