The New Diaspora, consists of migrants who left India in large numbers from the mid-1960s onwards – primarily to developed countries like the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe.

Around 1900, there were less than a thousand Indians in both the UK and the United States. By World War II, the number had grown to about 6,000 in each country.

♤ In Britain, this population consisted mostly of unskilled workers for low wages.

♤ In the US, this population consisted mostly of Sikhs who worked in agriculture in California.

Many factors contributed to this small number of migrants from India to these developed countries. Draconian legislation in the United States had banned immigration to the US from all but a handful of Western European countries. The Johnson–Reed Act of 1924, probably the most overtly racist immigration law in the world at the time, served to limit the annual number of immigrants to the US from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the US dating back to 1890.

The year ‘1890’ is not a completely arbitrary benchmark. The US established the law in order to stop Eastern Europeans Jews who had migrated in large numbers to the US after 1890 to escape persecution in Europe. Though aimed at Eastern Europeans, this law had the collateral effect of prohibiting the entry of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians to the US. According to the U.S. Department of State at the time, the purpose of the act was “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”

Similarly, at the turn of the century in Canada, also part of the British Empire at that time, there were about 100 Indians. This number rose to 5,000 by 1907, before a restrictive new law, the Continuous Passage regulation, stopped any further immigration. This law required that all migrants who intended to immigrate to Canada make a continuous journey from the countries of their citizenship. This law stopped Indian immigration in its tracks, since no steamships traveled directly from India to Canada. This became most evident in the “Komagatamaru” incident of 1914, when more than 350 immigrants from India sent back from Vancouver, as the ship carrying them, the Komagatamaru, had not travelled continuously form India to Canada.