Tibetan In Diaspora

Approximately 145,150 Tibetans live in exile and the worldwide distribution of exile Tibetan population is India 101,242; Nepal 16,313; Bhutan 1,883; and rest of the world 25,712.

Since 1959, when the Tibetan leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, fled to India, Tibetans in exile have managed to keep their culture and language alive and have successfully reconstituted their institutions in exile, dispersing into cohesive and fluid transnational networks to form a key emerging diaspora.

The exile Tibetan administration has established 52 close-knit Tibetan settlements in India (35), Nepal (10) and Bhutan (7). Each settlement has distinctive economic activities, local governance, schools, and housing and amenities under the exile Tibetan administration. Individual Tibetan families and communities also live in other ethnically mixed South Asian cities and towns.

These settlements tend to be populated by Tibetans sharing certain religious, familial, and/or regional backgrounds. Often, a monastery will be built near or around the settlement, and followers of that particular lama or sect will settle there. Likewise, families tend to expand progressively to include more extended family branches within the settlements as people migrate from Tibet or other regions in exile.

The vast majority of Tibetan migrants who live outside of South and Central Asia were resettled from South Asian communities. The process of dispersion to the West began in the early 1960s, when the Swiss Red Cross resettled about 1,500 Tibetans in Switzerland. Approximately 2,000 Tibetans reside permanently in Switzerland today. The second-largest community of Tibetans in Europe is in the United Kingdom, which is estimated to be around 650.

According to estimates in the 1998 Tibetan CTA census, Scandinavia had about 110 Tibetans and 640 Tibetans lived in the remaining European countries combined.

Tibetans began moving to North America in the 1970s after the Dalai Lama encouraged both the Canadian and US governments to accept refugees based on the success of the Swiss experience. Although individual Tibetans and Tibetan families immigrated to the United States during this same period, the first formal movement took place in the early 1990s after the US Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, which authorized the issuance of "1,000 immigrant visa to 'displaced' Tibetans living in India and Nepal." The present Tibetan population in the United States is estimated to be around 9000.

In more recent waves of Tibetan immigration to the Americas, Tibetans have tended to cluster in key urban centers in the Americas, namely Toronto and New York, but also Minneapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Boston, Calgary, and Vancouver.

Tibetans in Australia and New Zealand emigrated there on their own, married nationals, or went to study, work, or engage in religious or cultural activities. Since the late 1990s, the Tibetan government in exile has sent some ex-political prisoners to Australia for resettlement and rehabilitation. According to the 2006 Australian census, 533 people claimed Tibetan ancestry; nearly half reported residing in the Sydney area. The 2006 New Zealand census counted 66 people of Tibetan ethnicity.