An illegal immigrant in India is a foreigner who has entered the Republic of India either without valid documents or who initially had a valid document, but has overstayed beyond the permitted time, as per the general provisions of the Citizenship Act as amended in 2003. Such persons are not eligible for citizenship by registration or naturalisation.Citizenship Act, 1955, indiacode.nic.in, 2004. They are also liable to be imprisoned for 2–8 years and fined.The Foreigners (Amendment) Act, 2004, India Kanoon, 2004.

Refugees in India are different from the illegal immigrant in India. An exception was made in 2015 for minority communities of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who were compelled to seek shelter in India due to religious persecution or fear of religious persecution. They are not classified as illegal migrants and remain eligible for citizenship,Foreigners (Amendment) Order, 2015Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, Gazette of India, 2019. as they are legally considered refugees in India.

The Indian Census of 2001 gives information about migrants, but not exclusively illegal immigrants. As per the 2001 Census, Bangladeshis form the largest group of migrants in India, followed by Pakistanis.

Legal framework

Indian citizens and National Register of Citizens Indian nationality law is governed by the Citizenship Act, 1955 (Articles 5 to 11 (Part II) of the Constitution of India), which has been amended by the Citizenship (Amendment) Acts of 1986, 1992, 2003, 2005, 2015 and 2019.

The National Register of Citizens of India (NRC) is a register envisaged by the Government of India containing names and certain relevant information for identification of Indian citizens. The register was first prepared based on the 1951 Census of India, but it was not maintained afterwards. The exercise to update it for the state of Assam was carried out recently via an order of the Supreme Court of India in the year 2013.

The Government of India has announced its intention to recreate an NRC for the whole of India, but it is not yet been operationalised Rohingyas, Bangladeshi refugees likely target of Khattar govt’s updated NRC, Hindustan Times, 16 September 2019.UP DGP Asks Top Cops to Start Identifying Illegal ‘Bangladeshi and Foreigner’ Immigrants, NewsClick, 1 October 2019. Meanwhile, there have been demands from some border states, such as Manipur, to create an NRC for their states.

Foreigners Persons in India without either a valid Indian citizenship or a visa are considered by the central government as illegal and unlawful immigrants. Illegal immigrants are subject to the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 which defines a foreigner as a person who is not a citizen of India under Section 2(f). According to Foreigners (Amendment) Order, 2015 persons belonging to minority communities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who were compelled to seek shelter in India due to religious persecution or fear of religious persecution and entered into India on or before 31 December 2014 with or without valid documents including passport or other travel document are granted exemption from the application of provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946. Where the nationality of a person is not evident, the onus of proving whether a person is a foreigner or not shall lie upon such person. Furthermore, anyone who believes that a foreigner has entered India, or the owners and managers of the property where such a foreigner resides illegally in India must inform the nearest police station within 24 hours of their presence becoming known.The Foreigners Act, 1946, Indian Kanoon. The Foreigners Act empowers the Indian administration to detain a person until they are deported back to their country.

Illegal migrants Preventing the entry of illegal migrants into India is important as they impose pressure on citizens and pose a security threat, especially in sensitive areas such as Jammu and West Bengal. For example, the Indian security establishments said that "Some Rohingyas sympathizing with many militant group's ideologies may be active in Jammu, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mewat and can be a potential threat to internal security."

According to Indian law, illegal immigrants are not refugees. Since India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the United Nations principle of non-refoulement and impediment to expulsion does not apply in India. Illegal immigrants are denied impediment to expulsion if they do not fall within the host country's legal definition of a lawful refugee.Search results on "Impediment to expulsion" in the European Court of Human Rights archive.

Illegal immigrants are people who migrate to a country in violation of the immigration laws of that country, or the continued residence of people without the legal right to live in that country. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upward, from poorer to richer countries.

In 2005, the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, 1983 was rejected by the Supreme Court of India which held that the act "has created the biggest hurdle and is the main impediment or barrier in the identification and deportation of illegal migrants."Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, 1983, Indian Kanoon. On 9 August 2012, during a Supreme Court hearing about a public interest litigation petition for deportation of illegal migrants, it was told that the policy of the government of India does not support any kind of illegal migration either into its territory or illegal immigration of its citizens and the government is committed to deporting illegal Bangladeshi migrants, but only lawfully.

Legal refugees

The government of India has recognised immigrants from Tibet and Sri Lanka as refugees in the past, providing free education and some identification to the former.

The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 amended the Citizenship Act, 1955 to allow migrants from minority communities like Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Parsi who fled religious persecution from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to be eligible for Indian citizenship provided they came into the country on or before 31 December 2014, excluding people from the Muslim community (the majority community of those nations).

Demographics

Afghanistan immigrants

By 2009, India had over 13,000 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan. According to a report by the Afghan embassy in Delhi, refugees from Afghanistan, estimated at around 30,000 families, have, over the past two and a half decades, fled from their hometowns due to large-scale conflicts, seeking safety in India's capital city. Many outsiders call Delhi home, but the Afghan people claim a special relationship with India and its capital, due to the ancient and modern history between both nations. There are nearly 11,000 Afghan refugees registered with the UNHCR in India, mainly living in Delhi and bordering areas. The refugees in Delhi face considerable hardships and difficulties.Sarkar, S. (2020), "Life of the Afghan Refugee Women in Delhi Region: Highlighting Their Miserable Conditions and Possible Legal Assistance", Das, S.K. and Chowdhary, N. (Ed.) Refugee Crises and Third-World Economies, Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 149-157

Bangladeshi immigrants

In 2004, a rule of thumb was that for each illegal immigrant caught, four illegally entered the country. While many immigrants have settled in the border areas, some have moved on to places such as Mumbai and Delhi. During the UPA government, Sriprakash Jaiswal, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, made a statement in Parliament on 14 July 2004, saying that "12 million illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators were living in India", and West Bengal had the most with 5.7 million Bangladeshis. This led to protests from state government of Assam, ruled by Congress, and consequent retraction of this statement, saying that the numbers are unreliable. More recently, Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State for Home Affairs in the NDA government has put the figure at around 20 million.

According to the 2001 census, 3,084,826 people in India came from Bangladesh. No reliable numbers on illegal immigrants are currently available. Extrapolating the census data for the state of Assam alone gives a figure of 2 million. Figures as high as 20 million are also reported in the government and media.2 cr Bangladeshis in India: Fernandes Tribune India - 27 September 2003 Samir Guha Roy of the Indian Statistical Institute called these estimates "motivated exaggerated". After examining the population growth and demographic statistics, Roy states that while a vast majority are illegal immigrants, significant amounts of internal migration is sometimes falsely thought to be immigrants. An analysis of the numbers by Roy revealed that on average around 91000 Bangladeshis illegally crossed over to India every year during the years 19811991.

The Bangladesh Liberation War and continued political and economic turmoil in Bangladesh in the following decades forced some Bangladeshis to seek refuge in India. During the war, at least 10 million Bangladeshis (80% of whom were Hindus) have crossed into India illegally to seek refuge from widespread rape and genocide. Most of them migrated to the border states, particularly West Bengal and Assam. Due to persecution, illegal migrants have been defined in Assam Accord as those who infiltrated illegally after 24 December 1971. Till today, illegal border crossing persists in India through Tripura and other states.

Burmese immigrants

There are an estimated 50,000100,000 Burmese Chin illegal immigrants stated to be residing in India, mostly in the Indian state of Mizoram, Manipur and a small number in Delhi.

In recent years, Rohingyas have been increasingly seeking refuge in India, facing longstanding state-persecution in Myanmar.

According to the Union Government, there were 10,565 Rohingya families in India as of 2015; Samaddar et al. extrapolated to arrive at a figure of over a million immigrants.

In August 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party led Union Government asked state governments to initiate the process of deportation for all illegal immigrants including Rohingyas. The government did not buckle despite criticism. This was challenged before the Supreme Court of India by three Rohingya refugees, wherein the Government of India submitted an affidavit claiming that there were over 40,000 "illegal [Rohingya] immigrants", mostly spread across Assam, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir and that they were a threat to the security of state.

In March 2021, several media reports claimed that about 150 Rohingya refugees from Jammu were held in detention centers. An interim application was filed seeking their release though the government denied any detainment. A bench of Sharad Bobde, A. S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanian passed an interim order in favor of the government; government-arguments about India being not bound to follow international conventions, she has not explicitly ratified and Art. 14 and Art. 21 not conferring any immunity to non-citizens from deportation (as mandated by procedure) were accepted.

Pakistani immigrants About 7,600 illegal immigrants from Pakistan resided in India in 2010. Many of the migrants are Hindus and Sikhs, who have overstayed, attempting to gain citizenship.

Concerns over Bangladeshi illegal immigrants

Higher judiciary's concerns