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India has emerged as the world’s largest remittance recipient, receiving a record $138 billion annually from its global diaspora. These inflows have nearly doubled over the past decade, reflecting rising incomes of Indian professionals abroad. With advanced economies contributing a larger share, the trend marks a shift from traditional Gulf-based remittances. Sending nearly $1000 every three seconds, overseas Indians are strengthening India’s financial stability and helping bridge nearly half of the country’s trade deficit.
The World Migration Report 2026, released by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) on Tuesday, said that globally around 304 million people lived in a country other than their country of birth as of mid-2024.
The proportion of international migrants as a share of the total global population has also increased, but only incrementally, from 2.9 per cent in 1990 to 3.7 per cent in 2024.
The report said that the Mexico-to-United States country-to-country corridor remains the largest in the world, with around 11 million people.
The second largest is Afghanistan to Iran (more than 3.7 million migrants) followed by Syria to Turkiye (over 3.5 million), comprising mainly refugees displaced by the Syrian civil war. The corridor between Russia and Ukraine takes up the fourth spot.
The India-United Arab Emirates corridor is the fifth-largest, comprising mainly migrant workers. More than 8 million international migrants lived in the United Arab Emirates (comprising 74 per cent of the population), with Indians (more than three million) being the top nationality, the report said.
The India to US migration corridor is the sixth largest in the world, the report said. However, the India-United States of America corridor is the second largest migration corridor involving North American countries, after the Mexico-United States corridor.
The report said that around 3.2 million Indian migrants were living in the United States in 2024, the second largest foreign-born group after Mexicans. However, according to current estimates by other agencies, the Indian diaspora in the US is about five million strong.
“The number of international migrants from India has increased continuously and significantly over the last several decades, with many arriving in the United States as highly skilled workers or international students,” the IOM report said.
It added that the number of Indians in the US is followed by migrant numbers from two other Asian countries, China and the Philippines, which had nearly 2.5 million and about 2.3 million migrants, respectively, living in the United States in 2024.
The report noted that diasporas also engage in political activism, advocating for policy changes in both origin and destination countries.
“The Indian diaspora in the United States, particularly through organisations like the United States-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), has influenced United States-India relations. Indian-Americans have played a role in strengthening bilateral trade agreements, defence cooperation and visa policies that benefit both countries,” the UN report said.
Some of the other significant migration corridors from Asia involve large numbers of migrant workers from countries such as India and Bangladesh to Gulf countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The top 20 international country-to-country migration corridors in 2024 also include the Bangladesh-India corridor in 11th spot and India-Saudi Arabia (14).
The report noted that in Asia, the distribution of female and male migrants in the top 10 countries of destination and origin is much more varied than it is in other regions. In the top destination countries, Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have a far greater share of male than female immigrants.
India, meanwhile, had a higher share of female than male immigrants. Among the top 10 countries of origin in Asia, nearly all of them -- China and the Philippines are the exceptions -- had a larger share of male than female emigrants.
Countries with a significantly high proportion of male emigrants include India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and Indonesia. This male-dominant migration pattern is largely shaped by labour migration trends, particularly toward Gulf and South-East Asian countries, where demand in sectors like construction, manufacturing and agriculture continues to drive the emigration of working-age men.