According to the US Customs and Border Protection, India is the fifth largest source of illegal migrants entering the USA from the southwest border
Representational image. News18
The flow of illegal immigrants from India to the US is a relentless process. Numerous youngsters, an overwhelming majority of them from Punjab and Haryana, embark on this dangerous, all-or-nothing journey. Some of them eventually succeed in their surreptitious endeavor, while the rest are caught, rounded up and after a long drawn out process, deported.
What had brought these men to those godforsaken parts, so far away from home? As it would turn out, it was the Great American Dream at work: Mile by arduous mile, they were trying to make their way to the States.
For these young men and women, the American dream kicks in when their job hunts go nowhere and their farm produce fails to fetch a good price. It sets them on a dangerous path where they have to dodge smugglers and drug cartels, and risk poisonous snake bites while groping their way through jungles that are known to house incurable, deadly diseases. What sustains them through this life-or-death trek is the lure of the dollar — the hope of having a better life in good old America.
According to the US Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), the fifth largest source of illegal migrants entering the USA from the southwest border is India. Only four countries send more migrants to US — Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
India has had a tight grip on the fifth spot since 2016. It accounted for 3,668 illegal migrants in 2016, 3,135 in 2017 and 9,234 in 2018. The number of Indians entering the US did see a slight dip in 2016-17, around the time Donald Trump took office, but that scare has since waned. The number of Indian illegals seized by USCBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is going up every year, but the number of those who want to take that road is not slowing down.
The recent deportation of 311 Indians caught at the Mexican border reveals the same pattern. In a testimony to the undiminished intensity of the inflow, all these 311 were caught by Mexican officials in the span of just a few weeks.
One could do a simple inmate search on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website and find a large number of Singhs, Kaurs, Deepaks and Gauravs. Most of them had tried to enter America by stealth.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, nearly 40 per cent of the detainees at the Victorville federal prison as of 2018 were Indians seeking asylum in the US.
The desire to study or work — and later take residency — in a foreign country, preferably Western, is not new to Indians. Nor is the idea of illegally entering the developed world a new phenomenon in India. Donkey, the illegal method of entering a foreign country via multiple stops in other countries, is a popular method adopted by thousands every year after they’ve failed to enter the target country via legitimate means.
One need not knock on too many doors to know where this ‘donkey’ culture has had the most impact. A simple YouTube search on illegal migration from India to the US returns hundreds of video pop-ups of young men — almost all in their 20s — either hiking across South American jungles or crossing water bodies on boats. In an overwhelming majority of these videos, people talk in Punjabi and openly state that they are from Punjab. Some claim to be from Haryana and a few others from Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.
Steps taken by US & India
The US government has set up the department of homeland security which is committed to enforcing their immigration laws so that they can secure the borders and keep the American people safe. DHS takes action to disrupt cartels, smugglers, and nefarious actors. These actions include referring and then prosecuting 100 per cent of illegal border crossers, building the first new border wall in a decade, and deploying the National Guard to the border.
However, smugglers, human traffickers, and nefarious actors know the loopholes well and continue to exploit them. To truly keep the American people safe, the legal loopholes need to be recognised and amended as that have left the US with policies that serve as tremendous magnets for illegal immigration.
On the other hand, the Indian government has neither established any such legislative or executive actions to track down such undocumented immigrants and the culprits who allure these innocent people in taking up the criminal activity nor any penal actions have been laid down in the various Indian statutes to curb such illegal activities.
In my opinion, it is high time that both the governments should take up stricter measures to track down and stop such illegal immigration by entering into a strong treaty whereby either of the state shall help each other to track such activity and handover the culprits from any point where they are recognised, so that exemplary punishments may be given to such criminals in order to make the others aware of the penal actions for taking up such criminal activities. Besides, public awareness campaigns should be broadcasted in order to let people know about the consequences of such illegal activities including death while crossing borders, murders, multiple rapes etc.
The author is an Indo-US lawyer and the Director of Gehis Immigration and the chief advisor to the President of Suriname. Views are personal.
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