A group of approximately 800 Indian-Americans gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House last weekend to march — wait for it — in favour of U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Apparently, there are some Indian-origin persons who do support Mr. Trump’s harsh rhetoric on securing America’s borders, not only through the southern border wall with Mexico, but also stricter enforcement of controls over legal migration.
How could this be, given that migration is the engine that powers the globally aspirational Indian of today? And as, historically, Indians have always been a vibrant immigrant community on distant shores, consistently maintaining deep familial and professional ties across the world?
In part the “protest” may have stemmed from the fact that the head of the group that organised it is Shalabh Kumar, the Illinois-based Indian-American businessmen who claims to have close ties within the Trump team. Any demonstration of support to Mr. Trump’s agenda could be politically beneficial to Mr. Kumar.
However, to an extent the views of those protesters in Washington may represent the divergence between the needs of visa-holding “aliens” such as H-1B tech workers from India, and those of undocumented migrants to the U.S., a 11.4 million-strong population.
Undocumented workers seek the unrestricted right to enrol in educational institutions, work, marry, and own property, as well as access social security, health insurance, college tuition support, and other such welfare benefits that the federal government is required by law to provide to U.S. persons.
On the other hand, non-immigrant workers are focussed on attaining a higher level of access to and integration into their adopted home. They seek to convert their alien status into permanent resident or citizen status. They worry about getting their visas extended and lengthy green card queues; about what the fate of their children will be once they reach the age of 21 and cannot claim dependent status; and about the options available to spouses of H-1B visa-holders, H-4 visa-holders, to seek gainful employment and escape facing social isolation and professional atrophy after years of productive career growth in India.
These aspiring migrants, who consider themselves to be on the “merit” side of Mr. Trump’s immigration paradigm, also separate themselves from the “family-based migrants,” who seek to immigrate legally to the U.S. based on the status of close family members and not work-related qualifications.
They take to heart the words of Mr. Trump, who in his State of the Union speech last month vowed to crack down on “chain migration” and end the visa lottery system, and move toward creating an immigration framework geared more toward “merit-based” migration.
Yet the hope of visa-based temporary foreign workers that this government will not turn upon them eventually may be belied. The rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration, including an executive action last summer that called for stricter enforcement of laws regulating H-1B visa entry, appears to have thus far put both forms of legal migration in its cross hairs as much as it does undocumented migration.
