Beyond the model minority, a fuller picture of Australia’s Indian community

On 29 April 2026, the Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded a quiet milestone. For the first time since records began, more Australians were born in India than in any other overseas country. At 30 June 2025 there were 971,020 India-born residents, edging past England’s 970,950 by roughly 70 people, according to the ABS. China followed at 731,540, then New Zealand and the Philippines. Overseas-born residents now make up 32 per cent of the population, close to the record 32.4 per cent set in 1891.

The temptation is to file this under good news and move on. India-born Australians are, on average, young and highly credentialled. The 2021 Census recorded a median age of 35, well below the overseas-born median of 43, and found that 64.3 per cent of India-born adults held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Vasan Srinivasan, president of the Federation of Indian Associations of Victoria, told SBS in May 2026 that “ninety-nine per cent of Indians who come here come with skills.” The comfortable shorthand for all this is the “model minority.”

The label that flatters and confines

Three researchers at the Australia India Institute argue that shorthand does more harm than it appears to. Writing for the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter on 6 May 2026, Hiya Harinandini, Maisha Samiha and Dr Teesta Prakash warned that reducing “Australia’s largest overseas-born community to an economic asset is corroding the foundations of social trust.” Harinandini leads work on education and skills policy at the institute, Samiha works across multiculturalism and global affairs, and Prakash is a research fellow in security and geopolitics. Their point is not that the achievements are false, but that the community has been measured by how much it earns and how well it integrates, and rarely by how its members feel or take part in public life.

Many Indias, not one

Treating almost a million people as a single block hides how varied they are. Census figures compiled by SBS’s Cultural Atlas show the India-born split roughly into 51 per cent Hindu, 22 per cent Sikh, 11 per cent Catholic and 4 per cent Muslim, a religious mix broadly confirmed by the Victorian Government’s 2021 community profile. Language tells the same story of difference. Punjabi is the most commonly spoken tongue at home, ahead of Hindi, then a long tail that includes Malayalam, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Urdu and Kannada. A north Indian Sikh farmer’s family in Melbourne’s Wyndham and a Malayali nurse from Kerala share a country of birth and little else in daily life.

Cohort matters too. Roughly a third of India-born residents arrived between 2016 and 2021, so a large share are recent arrivals still finding their footing rather than settled citizens. And some hierarchies travel. A Diversity Council Australia analysis by University of Melbourne scholars Hari Bapuji and Snehanjali Chrispal documented caste operating inside Australian workplaces, through hiring, social exclusion and everyday slights. No Australian law names caste as a protected attribute, which leaves those affected with little formal recourse.

Skills that sit unused

The idea that every Indian migrant arrives and thrives collides with the evidence on work. A 2021 report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, A good match, found that nearly a quarter of permanent skilled migrants were working in jobs beneath their skill level, at a cost of at least A$1.25 billion in foregone wages between 2013 and 2018. A 2023 study for the federal government by Flinders University’s Australian Industrial Transformation Institute, which names India as the largest single source of migrants, found that more than 35 per cent of temporary migrants held postgraduate qualifications across every major occupational group, including some driving machines and working as labourers. The engineer stacking shelves is not a cliche invented by critics of migration, it is in the data.

The insecurity beneath the success

Much of the recent Indian intake came on temporary visas, and precariousness follows. A survey released on 7 May 2026 by the Migrant Justice Institute, led by Associate Professors Bassina Farbenblum of UNSW and Laurie Berg of UTS, drew 9,963 responses from temporary visa holders. Two-thirds were paid less than the law required, a quarter were underpaid by at least A$10 an hour, and international students alone were short-changed an estimated A$3.18 billion a year. “When an employer controls whether you work next week and whether your visa remains intact, the power imbalance is enormous,” Farbenblum said.

That same dependence shadows family life. Research led by Marie Segrave at Monash University found migration status routinely used as a weapon against women on temporary visas. In a 2020 study of 100 women receiving family violence support, 55 per cent had been threatened with deportation and 60 per cent with the withdrawal of visa sponsorship. Language barriers, thin support networks and unfamiliarity with Australian systems deepen the trap.

Growing old a long way from home

At the other end of life sit the parents. Australia offers family reunion in principle, but the queue tells its own story. As of July 2026, the Department of Home Affairs estimated that newly lodged contributory parent visas would take about 15 years to process, and non-contributory and aged parent visas about 33 years. Many older Indians who do arrive depend heavily on adult children for transport, income and company, and can find themselves isolated in unfamiliar suburbs, distant from the extended households they left. Their wellbeing rarely reaches a headline.

A fuller picture

None of this cancels the achievement. It sits alongside it, and the two are felt at once. The mood outside the community has hardened. The Scanlon Foundation’s 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion survey, as reported by SBS, found 30 per cent of Australians held negative views of Indian immigrants, and the share who thought immigration was too high climbed from 24 per cent in 2022 to 51 per cent in 2025. Sikh community leader Amar Singh put it plainly: “In close to three decades here, I have not seen this much blatant racism.”

A community of almost a million people contains graduates and the underpaid, the settled and the anxious, many faiths, many languages, and a caste line most Australians never see. Honouring what Indian Australians have built means resisting the flattering summary that reduces them to a payslip and a pass mark. The fuller picture is more demanding and more human, and it asks a question the numbers cannot answer on their own, which is not how much these Australians earn, but how they are faring.

Related reading: the long wait for a parent visa, whether students drive up rents and the India Australia trade deal in 2026.