NASA engineers, tech CEOs, astronauts and Spelling Bee winners are among the Indians in America most likely to be celebrated back home. Never mind if they’ve renounced their blue passports. We’re also very likely to recall every American politician with a drop of Indian blood in them; we make more of Nikki Haley’s Indian origin than Haley herself.Indians in America have long prided themselves on being a model minority, just the sort that America would want to have. But far from Silicon Valley’s gleaming tech companies chock-a-block with Indian engineers, lives another, often invisible India in America.
The death of six-year-old Gurpreet Kaur of hyperthermia in the deserts of Arizona while her mother spent 22 hours wandering about in search of water is a reminder of the other Indians in America, the undocumented migrants in search of a better life.Gurpreet’s is the second death of a migrant child in the southern deserts of Arizona this year.
Gurpreet and her mother were part of a group of five Indians dropped off at a remote border region by smugglers. She was a month away from turning seven when her body was found near Lukeville, Arizona, on a day the temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius.Her story is one that has left many Indians, living comfortably in America, with a sense of cognitive dissonance. It simply doesn’t fit the popular narrative around Indians in America.
While the Trump regime’s crackdown on H-1B visas, and the threat of H-1B spouses losing their work permits is, today, an issue of primary concern for many members of the Indian community in America, desis in the US are often missing from the discourse around America’s border policies and Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico. We think the wall is a measure aimed at preventing Latin Americans from walking into the US, not Indians.
While much has been written about the long wait for Indians in the green card queue, another queue is beginning to emerge as a long line of Indians enters the US via Mexico.Nearly nine thousand Indians were caught at the southwest border in 2018, three times more than the previous year, and over a hundred times more than the 77 caught a decade ago, in 2008.The total number of Indians caught entering the US last year (including those caught at the southwest, northern and coastal borders) stood at 9,234, over 50 times more than the 173 caught in 2008.
Official data points to the death of 58 migrants in southern Arizona this year, largely caused by the heat, up to May 30, while 127 died last year.Border Patrol has blamed smuggling cartels for Gurpreet’s plight, calling it a “senseless death driven by cartels who are profiting from putting lives at risk.”But human rights activist and executive director of Border Action Network, Juanita Molina, told Reuters that US border security measures were also partly to blame for the child’s death. “They’re trying to unload people in places where they can avoid detection themselves…. For a young child, death can come very quickly,” she said.
Organisations like the one Molina belongs to, as well as others like No More Deaths, have been providing humanitarian assistance to migrants crossing the border. In addition to legal services, the organisations have been leaving crates of water in this dry, arid region for migrants who may be thirsty and at risk of dying.
Those who don’t die crossing the border are at risk of dying once they’re captured. American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez likened US border detention camps to concentration camps.“This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalised with dehumanising conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis,” she recently tweeted, while sharing an Esquire piece.
“So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September,” said the report in Esquire, published earlier this month.
Much has been written, about both, the humanitarian crisis at the border, and the horrific separation of children from parents at the US border last year. However, prominent Indian voices have been largely absent from the discourse around American border security and the proposed wall with Mexico. For many Indians, this may be largely because they do not believe this has anything to do with their communities and their lives. Many who are well-settled in America may also want to dissociate themselves from poorer Indian immigrants who slip through the border by night.
The divide between wealthy Indian migrants and poor Indian migrants is not new, and is a phenomenon seen in many developed Western countries. A decade ago in Australia, when Indian students were being physically attacked on the streets, many better-off Indians wanted to distance themselves from these students, many of whom were young men living together in cramped quarters and working late nights to afford their university tuition fee.
If there’s one divide that the Indian community in America needs to jump over, it’s the wall dividing those who are comfortably off from those at the bottom of the ladder.A humanitarian crisis is unfolding at America’s southern border, a crisis that is claiming many lives, including those of young Indians.
The more affluent members of the Indian community, the ones whose success is celebrated with much fanfare back home, may want to consider supporting humanitarian interventions at the border.An affluent Indian in America may not want to support the illegal entry of other Indians across the border. But they may want to ensure that they have enough water to drink, so that they don’t drop dead in the middle of the desert due to the heat.