Is Indian talent sparking global anxiety?

While not new, hostility against migrant talent in the West has sharpened. (Image credit: Kelly via Pexels)

In today’s swirl of geopolitics, India—and Indian professionals across technology, healthcare, and academia—have become convenient targets for global anxieties. From tariffs under the Trump administration to the threat of secondary sanctions over oil imports and recurring spectres of H-1B restrictions, India is often painted as a problem even when it plays by the rules.

This raises a blunt question: is global vexation against India and Indians at an all-time high? External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently reminded critics that China, not India, is the largest buyer of Russian oil. Yet the charge from figures in Washington still lingers. Why, then, does the global refrain echo with claims that “Indians are taking our jobs” or “spoiling our economy”?

Prejudice against Indians abroad is hardly new—M.K. Gandhi experienced it in South Africa; scholars such as Amartya Sen and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan have spoken of it too. What feels different now is the scale and the moment. Even as advanced economies lean more heavily on Indian talent, hostility has sharpened, wherein lies a paradox.

The numbers are telling. Over one million Indian doctors and two million nurses practice across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, some estimates suggest. In the US, Indians form the largest immigrant physician group, accounting for nearly 5 percent of doctors. In Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), they are the single largest nationality among foreign doctors and nurses. In higher education, the trend is equally striking: in 2022, more than 139,000 Indians received UK study visas—surpassing China though recent numbers suggest a pivot towards France. Germany now hosts 60,000 Indian students, while in the US, most Indian STEM PhD graduates remain to strengthen the workforce. Globally, Indian IT exports exceed $150 billion annually, and diaspora remittances reached a record $135 billion in 2023. These are not marginal contributions; they are structural.

Despite these facts, hostility persists. Consider a few recent vignettes:

a. In Ireland, mobs chanted “Go home, Indians” in public squares after it seems an Indian family did a housewarming ceremony.

b. In US cities, reports of anti-Asian slurs often targeting South Asians, also Chinese, have doubled in a single year according to a recent study.

c. At one European university, a senior academic of Dutch origin casually admitted to “lurking” on the online teaching materials of an Indian colleague.

d. Two PhD students dismissed an Indian PhD program director as an “asshole” merely for asking them to justify funding requests.

e. In schools, children of Indian heritage have been told to “go back to where you came from.”

f. From Oslo to Brighton, scholars of Indian origin have also filed complaints (even to local police) after receiving racial slurs or professional exclusion with essentially zero protection from their respective universities.

These are not trivial slights. They corrode institutions that pride themselves on fairness and merit but who cannot protect their international professionals due to corroded processes and bigoted capture of institutions.

The contradiction is glaring. Western economies cannot function without migrant professionals, yet their politics thrive on vilifying them. Hospitals without Indian doctors would buckle. Universities that drive away international scholars bleed relevance. Economies that wall off global talent condemn themselves to stagnation.

Critics mutter about brain drain, visa misuse, or remittance outflows. But the facts are clear: brain drain enhances global welfare; visa misuse is the exception, not the rule; and remittances bind economies rather than deplete them.

This unease interestingly is not only cultural or economic, it is geopolitical. The world is now witnessing the slow but steady reconfiguration of power. Within the 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit, the Russia–India–China axis in Tianjin (August 31 - September 1) was shaping new norms of connectivity, energy trade, and security dialogue. For Western capitals, the optics of India’s continued energy trade with Russia or its engagement with China in forums like the SCO amplify anxieties.

In this light, the suspicion toward Indian excellence abroad reflects more than workplace resentment. It mirrors deeper fears: that India, indispensable to Western economies, is simultaneously embedding itself in alternative power architectures.

So is there now a fork in the road with respect to India in the global talent market? Migration markets are shifting. If the Anglosphere prefers resentment to reality, others will open their doors wider—from the cosmopolitan hubs in Asia’s rising centers, and to India itself. Those who cling to exclusion will find themselves bypassed.

Excellence is not theft. Contribution is not crime. If global institutions, countries and societies cannot tell the difference, then the greater loss will not be India’s, it will be theirs. One can with exclusion salvage the 'islands of migrants' but at what cost, it is worth pondering.