More than a quarter million Indian immigrants work in IT jobs in the U.S.

A recent study by Washington DC-based Migration Policy Institute has estimated that 29% of employed Indian men and 15.5% of working Indian women in the U.S. are employed in information technology jobs.

This works out to a total of 274,406 India born men and women coding away to glory in PHP, JavaScript, SQL, Python, Ruby and other programming languages.

If you include the H1B and L visa holders (both non-immigrants), the number of India born men and women working in IT jobs in the U.S. would easily exceed half a million.

IT jobs generally tend to pay well, upward of $60,000 per year.

The continuous entry of Indians on H1B and L visas and desi youngsters taking up jobs in the U.S. after their graduate studies are key reasons behind the high number of Indian IT workers in the states.

India was the the second most common country of origin for international students studying at US universities and colleges in 2011.

Indian IT workers are to be found both in tech startups as well as in support roles at several large corporations like Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and J.P.Morgan.

The growth in the numbers of Indian IT workers has had a negative impact on job prospects for American programmers.

One of the reasons few American kids get into computer science programs is because of the large scale import of IT workers from third world nations like India, China, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Indian Immigrants in U.S.

Indians represent the third largest immigrant group in the U.S. after Mexicans and the Chinese.

There are 1.86 million India born immigrants in the U.S.

Unlike Mexicans or the Chinese, Indian immigrants are better educated, more likely to have strong English language skills and arrive on employment-based visas.

Indians are also less likely to live below the federal poverty line than the overall foreign-born population.

Geographic Distribution

One-third of Indian immigrants have dropped anchor in the two states of New Jersey and California.

Indian immigrants have turned parts of New Jersey like Jersey City, Iselin and Edison into Little Indias, with all the attendant problems of filth, spitting Paan on the streets and haphazard parking.

In California, cities like Sunnyvale, San Jose and Artesia are major Indian hubs with scores of Indian restaurants, grocery stores, fashion boutiques dotting streets like Pioneer Blvd (Artesia) and El Camino Real (Sunnyvale).

The Migration Policy Institute report said more than 25% of Indian immigrants lived in three major metropolitan areas: greater New York, Chicago, and San Jose (in Northern California).

Indian Illegals

By the way, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that in January 2011, 240,000 (2%) of the approximately 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States were born in India.

My guess is that Indian illegal residents are more likely to have overstayed their visas rather than making the hazardous attempt to illegally cross the border from Mexico.

Indian illegals in the U.S. generally hail from North India although I’ve also seen a few Tamils and Telugus who’ve messed up their immigration status.