In their address to the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, the day that commemorates Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India from South Africa in 1915, successive Prime Ministers have said to the gathered audience of people of Indian origin (PIOs) overseas and non-resident Indians (NRIs) that they are Mother India’s ambassadors. They represent Indian culture and civilisation, talent and enterprise. Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a Pravasi Bharatiya gathering in Bhubaneswar last month that overseas Indians are “Bharat’s Rashtradoot”.
The Indian emigrants who have been charged with entering the United States illegally and have been forced to return home, transported in US military aircraft, are ambassadors of a different kind. They remind the world not of Indian talent and enterprise, culture or civilisation but of the lack of opportunity, of discrimination of one kind or another and of the unease of living here that makes them undergo the hardship of illegal migration.
The leadership of the national movement took a dim view of the enforced export of Indian labour to European colonies, both due to their concern for human rights and individual freedom as well as their view that the plight of poorly-paid Indian labour overseas is a blot on the face of Mother India. Under pressure from nationalist leadership, the government of British India represented to the imperial government in London in 1915: “Whatever may be the extent of the economic advantage arising from the emigration of indentured labour, the political aspect of the question is such that no one who has at heart the interest of British rule in India can afford to neglect it…For Indian politicians, moderate and extreme alike, consider that the existence of this system, which they do not hesitate to call by the name of slavery, brands their whole race in the eyes of the British Colonial Empire with the stigma of helotry.”
The status of today’s illegal migrants is, in many respects, no different from that of the indentured labour of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The latter’s great grandchildren may now be feted in India as overseas representatives of Bharat mata, but there are many children of Bharat mata today who emigrate illegally for reasons not very different from the ones that forced the poor of British India to be corralled into slavery.
Legal migrants are welcomed as fodder that fuels the development engines of the developed economies. They are welcomed because they bring with them either human or financial capital. Illegal migrants have only their wage labour to offer. Both have the capacity to contribute to the host economy, and both can potentially snatch away jobs from locals and yet developed countries treat the legal and illegal very differently. Demographics play a role, as do social attitudes.
Illegal migrants are viewed with contempt both in the host and home countries. In the former, because they are not viewed as an asset but as a liability. In the latter, they are viewed as an object of shame because they represent the underside of a nation’s development.
Media focus is at the moment on the number of illegal migrants identified by US authorities and the numbers being deported. Over the past five post-Covid years, the US Customs and Border Protection agency has detained as many as 170,000 Indian migrants attempting to enter the US illegally.
Interestingly, a large proportion of such illegal migrants are reportedly from the more developed states of Gujarat and Punjab. In both states, the sizeable presence overseas of Gujaratis and Punjabis is one factor that contributes both to the temptation to emigrate and the hope of eventual success, if they make it, networking through kinship links. However, it is also a fact that lack of adequate opportunities even in developed states has also contributed to the desperation of illegal emigrants.
The news of the enforced return of illegal migrants brings into sharp relief the dualism that characterises Indian emigration. India’s talented and wealthy are being welcomed across the world and they are happy to leave home. India’s depressed and desperate are, however, increasingly shunned. Donald Trump too makes this distinction. He has said that he would like to keep America’s doors open to India’s talented while shutting them to India’s desperate.
If, on the one hand, the desperate are trying to emigrate illegally, on the other hand, an increasing number of the wealthy are also leaving Indian shores in search of First World lives. Henley & Partners, a firm that describes itself as a “firm of global citizens” that assists clients acquire foreign citizenship and residence “through investment”, reports that 6,500 wealthy Indians opted for paid emigration in 2022 and 4,300 in 2024. Several developed economies are offering citizenship at a price and an increasing number of Indians are willing to pay that price.
Replying to a question in Parliament in August 2024, the Minister of State for External Affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, stated that a total of 2,25,260 Indians had “renounced their Indian citizenship” in 2022 and 2,16,219 in 2023. Taken together, a total of 18,80,559 Indians had given up their citizenship in the period 2011-23.
In the end, cross-border migration is a natural phenomenon made illegal only in the 20th century. Humans have moved through time in search of livelihood and opportunity. A large part of the “white American” population comprises Europe’s poor and desperate and not the European elites. European elite migration to the US is a 20th century phenomenon that began in the inter-war period and increased after that. The shiploads that crossed the Atlantic were Europe’s marginalised and desperate. The America that was open to such people, seeking a better and freer life is now shutting its doors to the world’s marginalised.
On returning home, how will these “illegal” migrants view the society that they left in desperation? What does life have in store for those who have been to the “land of opportunity” and then forced to return to a place that offered little opportunity? How will we respond to and reintegrate those who have been deported and sent back? The PIO and the NRI, the Rishi Sunaks, Satya Nadellas and Ajay Bangas, are received back home with much pride and fanfare. How will we receive the other pravasis?
The writer is an author and a former editor of The Financial Express. His forthcoming book examines the changing class background of emigrants from India
