It is indeed ironical that India is the country of origin of the largest number of immigrants when the Centre is beating up a frenzy against foreigners on the Indian soil.
Internal detention camps for ‘illegal’ immigrants are being built on a war footing, and there are those in the government who describe Bangladeshi refugees as ‘termites’.
The latest International Migrant Stock 2019, released by the UN, revealed that in 2019, India was the top exporter of international immigrants with 17.5 million emigres abroad, up from 15.9 million in 2015.
While, the number of migrants in India actually dropped to 5.15 million from 5.24 million in 2015. So why the anti-migrant hysteria?
Indian abroad
India for long has exported its labour to build others’ economies. After slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, over 2 million Biharis were ‘exported’ under what came to be called the indenture system to regions such as Mauritius and the Caribbean to work in sugar plantations and build rail roads.
From the salwar-wearing Punjabi women working in Heathrow’s cleaning services to the Malayalee liftmen and drivers at the backbone of the Middle-East economy, Indian migrants are everywhere.
More lately, we have exported a class of intellectuals who are today vital cogs in the wheels of the US and European banking, science and technology. Today, four million of these in the US, about 1.3 per cent of the population, are far from a drain on the local economy.
Over 20 per cent of the engineers at Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Intel, Google and Facebook are of Indian origin. They are the pioneers of wealth production.
Over the recent decade, we have seen a movement of another kind too – the forced migration of millions fleeing from the destruction of war, and sometimes hunger.
The civil war in Syria has killed thousands and turned 6.7 million population of 20 million Syrians into international refugees. About 6.25 lakh of population of one million Rohingya muslims have fled from Myanmar into Bangladesh to escape religious persecution.
According to the UN immigration report, the number of international migrants in the world had reached an estimated 272 million in 2019 — 51 million over in 2010, and up to 3.5 per cent of the global population from 2.8 per cent in 2000.
Chasing out foreigners
It is a myth propagated by right-wing nationalists that migrants at the bottom take away the jobs of locals, and generally bleed the local economy.
They, in fact, take up the lowest-paid jobs which locals shun. Bangladeshis work on roads and high-risk construction contracts in India, Mexicans in the cleaning and construction industry in the US and so on. They add to the local economy, not take away from it.
According to authors of ‘Immigration, Wages and Compositional Amenities’ — David Card, Christian Dustmann, and Ian Preston, “most existing studies of the economic impacts of immigration suggest these impacts are small, and on average benefit the native population”.
The above discussion gives context to the current debate on foreigners, as we prepare to deal with 1.9 million people who have been excluded from Assam’s final National Register of Citizens list. Most of those fighting citizenship cases have been living for generations in Assam, and it is unlikely that Bangladesh or any other country will even accept them back as its citizens. We can thus soon expect a new category of residents in India — lakhs of stateless people with nowhere to go except the hurriedly built detention camps.
There is the other side of the coin too. Assam has seen mass migration in past decades and there is palpable unease as the ‘invasion’ of outsiders threatens their land and culture. They have a right to safeguard their communities by blocking illegal infiltration. However, current migration does not seem to be the problem as much as the attempt to roll back fault lines inherited over a long historical period. The rich Brahmaputra plains attracted settlers looking for a better life; they have erected communities and tilled the land, but have not integrated as Assamese. However, to now turn them stateless and threaten deportation will only worsen the misery.
We have our own internal migration too with the friction that goes with it. Carpenters from Gorakhpur are working in Kochi after Malayalee skilled hands migrated to the Gulf; similarly, Punjab imports its farm labour from Bihar.
Shifting populations can be regulated to a point, but mass migration is ultimately a reflection of turbulence. It cannot be controlled. On a positive note, why don’t we see it as part of the march of Globalisation.
In the words of John Lennon's ‘Imagine’:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace