Indian workers, refugees in firing line of Trump migration crackdown

Donald Trump’s promised migration crackdown is already biting across Asia with India to take back potentially tens of thousands of its citizens living illegally in the US.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Donald Trump in 2020. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal migration is already biting across Asia, with India agreeing to take back potentially tens of thousands of citizens living unlawfully in the US, and authorities across the region on notice that refugee resettlements to America will be temporarily halted within days.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reportedly agreed to the return of at least 18,000 illegal Indian migrants, and potentially many more yet to be identified, in the interests of avoiding a trade war and to maintain access to the H1B skilled migration visa program – of which Indian citizens account for close to 75 per cent.

Unemployment is on the rise in India; the jobless rate peaked at 9.2 per cent in June 2024 while youth joblessness was as high as 40 per cent. The Modi government has sought to address the issue through migration agreements with Japan, Saudi Arabia and Israel but can ill-afford to lose the lucrative skilled migration channel to the US – which in recent years has taken more than 200,000 Indians annually – should Mr Trump choose to target it as part of his migration crackdown.

External Affairs Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal on Tuesday confirmed New Delhi would co-operate with all deportation and deterrence measures by the new Trump administration.

“This is being done to create more avenues for legal migration from India to the US,” he said.

Also in the firing line of Mr Trump’s fresh migration crackdown is the US Refugee Admissions Program which provides third-country resettlement in the US for the most vulnerable refugees. The program’s annual intake was reduced to less than 10,000 a year under the first Trump presidency, then raised to 120,000 under Joe Biden (though that quota was rarely filled).

Refugee advocates say those who qualify represent less than 2 per cent of the global refugee population and do so because they face acute protection challenges in their country of asylum.

But the USRAP program will be stopped altogether from Monday in the interests of national security, according to a White House executive order, while the new administration re-evaluates whether the program is “in the interests” of the US. Its suspension leaves tens of thousands of refugees in limbo across Asia and once again puts Australia, Canada and New Zealand under strain as the next largest resettlement nations.

“We are talking the most vulnerable of vulnerable refugees whose chances of resettlement will now be delayed by years,” one Asia-based official with knowledge of the process told The Australian. “We had been expecting this because (Trump) brought down worldwide resettlement numbers last time he was in office but this time he really knows what he’s doing.”

Indians last year accounted for just 3 per cent of all unlawful crossings over US borders, though almost a quarter of all illegal crossings into the US from Canada were Indian citizens.

A 2024 Department of Homeland Security report cited by Bloomberg estimated 220,000 unauthorised Indian immigrants were living in the US as of 2022.