Sri Lankan diaspora

The Sri Lankan diaspora are Sri Lankan emigrants and expatriates from Sri Lanka, and their descendants, that reside in a foreign country. They number a total estimated population of around 3 million. Expatriate workers to Sri Lankan have been a valuable export for the country. The number of expatriate workers have been ever growing as well as the remittances they send back. In 2009 Sri Lankans sent home US$3.3 billion, a US$400 million increase from the year before. It is expected that 2010 would exceed US$4 billion. In mid-2010 there were more than 1.8 million Sri Lankan expatriate workers. In Australia, under the White Australia policy, immigration was negligible. It resumed after the Second World War primarily involving migration of Burghers, who fulfilled the then criteria that they should be of predominantly European ancestry and that their appearance should be European. Sinhalese migration began in the 1960s but it was after the mid-1970s that large groups arrived, which also included Christians and Buddhists. Sri Lankan students undertook courses in Australia as part of the Colombo Plan prior to the formal dismantling of the White Australia policy, and after 1973, Sinhalese, Tamil and Moor migration resumed. The rate of assimilation among Sri Lankan Australians is fairly high: among second-generation immigrants, the 'in-marriage' rate was extremely low - 5.6% for women and 3.0% for men. According to The United Nations, there were 110,596 international migrants in Botswana and in that number 992 of them were from Sri Lanka. Libya's 2007 census says that there are over 15,010 workers from Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Sinhalese make up two-thirds of the buddhist population of Libya. Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and Mauritius were former British and Dutch colonies but the presence of Sri Lankans in Mauritius goes back to between 1819 and 1832 during the British Period when Sinhalese nobles were exiled to Mauritius from the result of the Kandyan wars. The total number of Mauritians with Sri Lankan descent is 5,000 which 80% of them are Sinhalese.