India leads global migration flows into advanced economies, OECD says

India has established a clear lead over every other origin country as a supplier of workers and new citizens to advanced economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) latest International Migration Outlook published this month.

The report shows that India has held this position since 2020, once war-related movements from Ukraine are set aside, and that its footprint in rich-country labor markets, health systems and citizenship rolls has widened rather than stabilized over the past year.

OECD members admitted just over 600,000 Indian nationals in 2023, an increase of roughly 8% from the previous year and the highest figure for any single origin country outside Ukraine.

The distribution of those flows remains sharply concentrated: almost one in four moved to the United Kingdom, which granted entry to about 144,000 Indians, up 28% from 2022. The bulk of that rise was driven by the UK’s health and care-worker route, where 97,000 visas were issued to Indian applicants and their dependents—39,000 principal applicants and 57,000 accompanying family members.

Canada admitted about 140,000, while the US recorded about 68,000 Indian arrivals, a steep 45% decline that began before the latest tightening of student and temporary-work rules.

For India, migration remains clustered in a small group of English-speaking destinations, and the OECD’s numbers show how these routes have gradually shifted from being predominantly temporary channels to pathways linked to long-term settlement.

“Since 2020, India has been the main country of origin of migration flows to OECD countries, Ukraine aside,” the report noted, underscoring how consistently India has topped the list.

That steady outward movement is beginning to reshape citizenship patterns across the rich-country bloc. In 2023 roughly 225,000 Indians acquired the nationality of an OECD country, the highest of any nationality and a record for India.

Canada, the US, Australia and the United Kingdom accounted for more than four-fifths of these naturalizations, indicating that the destinations drawing the largest inflows are also those where migrants are most likely to settle permanently.

Healthcare has emerged as one of the strongest anchors for India’s presence in OECD labor markets. The Outlook devotes a full chapter to the international mobility of doctors and nurses, describing migrant medical workers as “increasingly vital to the sustainability of OECD member countries’ health systems.”

India stands out as one of the principal countries of origin for migrant doctors, alongside Germany and China, and as one of the two largest sources of migrant nurses along with the Philippines.

Across the OECD, foreign-born professionals account for roughly a quarter of all doctors and one-sixth of all nurses, and Asia supplies close to 40% of migrant doctors and 37% of migrant nurses.

India’s contribution forms a significant share of those totals.

At the same time the broader migration landscape across the OECD has begun to shift. The organization reports that permanent migration fell by 4% to 6.2 million in 2024, its first decline since the pandemic recovery, though the level remains 15% above 2019 and well within historically high ranges.

The Outlook also highlights the persistent earnings penalty facing new arrivals: in 15 OECD countries with linked employer–employee data, immigrants entering the labor market earn about 34% less than native-born workers of comparable age and sex. Those gaps narrow as migrants move into better-paying firms and roles over time, but the initial difference remains significant.

The policy environment is hardening as well. A number of OECD countries have adopted explicit targets to reduce either overall migration or specific categories such as international students, care-worker dependents or temporary work visas.

Others have tightened asylum procedures or reduced benefits. The Outlook notes that labor-migration frameworks are increasingly being redesigned to attract talent “and to meet specific labor-market needs,” resulting in more selective channels even when overall demand for workers remains strong.

For India, that mix of continuing demand and greater selectivity means the size of the opportunity remains large, but the terms of entry may vary more sharply across destinations.

The concentration of Indian workers in certain sectors, particularly health and care, brings its own set of questions. For receiving countries, the availability of Indian-trained professionals helps plug structural shortages in hospitals and long-term care. For India, however, the outward movement of trained personnel intersects with domestic shortfalls, an issue the OECD flags by noting that tens of thousands of migrant doctors and nurses in its member states come from countries on the World Health Organization’s Health Workforce Support and Safeguards List.

India appears on that list, which identifies health systems facing critical workforce constraints, and the report highlights the importance of ethical recruitment. It also stresses that slow and opaque processes for recognizing foreign qualifications keep many migrant clinicians in roles below their level of training, an area where several OECD countries have begun reforms, including streamlining credential assessments and expanding bridging programs.

The cumulative effect of these trends is that India now occupies a central position not only in migration flows but in the functioning of several rich-country systems such as healthcare, higher education, long-term care, and, increasingly, naturalization patterns.

The data suggest that India has moved well beyond episodic or cyclical spikes and is now embedded as a structural contributor to the OECD’s labor force and demographic shifts.