Introduction

There have been remarkable differences amongst the countries in the two American continents regarding various facets of international migrants. Countries vary in terms of admission of migrants into their territories, recognition of their contribution in economic development, perceptions of people about the immigrants of different nationalities, providing them opportunities for integration into the mainstream society and devising political instruments for ‘migration management’.

Distinct waves of migration to different countries of the Americas were largely induced by the interaction of several push and pull factors, with very few common features. Countries in North America, for example, which were dominated by the large influx of white Europeans throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, started welcoming people from Asia, mainly from China and India, to fulfill their manpower requirements after World War II (Martin and Midgley 1999). This policy shift in the destination countries has resulted in transforming the composition of the migrant population from sending countries like India. The erstwhile low-skilled people who went to work on large agricultural farms and lumber mills were replaced by enlarging cohorts of the highly skilled, working mainly in the services sector and other knowledge professions (Khadria 1999; Lal 2006). In contrast, Indian migrants in many of the South American countries are still clustered in low and semi-skilled occupations. Majority of them are poorly educated and do not possess the kind of occupational and professional skills required to improve their ranks in the host societies. Due to this apparent lack of human capital, and consequent low occupational profile, they are not able to hold the kind of positions that many other people of Indian origin enjoy in the countries of North America. Quite different from these two continents, Indian migration to the Caribbean, which started with the colonial emergence of plantations and economic opportunities for jobseekers during the nineteenth century, especially after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, is much older.