President Donald Trump has clearly decided “shock and awe” will be the signature of his presidency. In the first weeks of his new term, he’s announced a slew of headline-grabbing moves. He wants the US to take over Gaza and turn it into a Riviera.. He has moved to dismantle USAID. He wants to bring back plastic straws.
And he is deporting Indians who are in the US illegally by the planeload. That’s making big news in India.
NEWS CLIP1: The Indian nationals who were deported from United States for illegally arriving in the country, claimed that they were sent back on a military aircraft with their hands and leg cuffed.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
But why by military aircraft? Surely that flies in the face of his pledge to CUT costs. Military aircraft costs a lot more than a commercial carrier. But Trump uses military planes and handcuffs and chains to drive home a point. Trump wants everyone to take note of pictures of handcuffed migrants tied together boarding a military aircraft.
But inadvertently Trump has brought something else to the world’s notice. India, not just Mexico and Central America, is a major source of illegal migration to the United States. The Pew Research Centre has already pegged India as the third largest source of unauthorised immigrants in the US, behind Mexico and El Salvador. Pew estimated the number of Indians residing without valid documentation in the USA at 725,000.
Indian-Americans like to think of themselves as the “model minority.” A recent book bears that pride in its very title - Indian Genius - The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America. It interviews the super achievers in the community like Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, Nikki Haley and Deepak Chopra. Its blurb on Amazon calls its “essential reading for anyone interested in the path to success in America.” Its author Meenakshi Ahamed was at the Kolkata Literary Meet recently.
MA1: there are a lot of wealthy, successful Indians. All of you can name at least five people who you know, who have gone to America and done very well financially, but those are not the people that interested me. What I wanted to see was, who are the Indians that have been transformational.
And she had plenty to choose from in different fields
MA2: So I decided it was Silicon Valley. The techies. People in medicine. And increasingly, people in the public sphere.
Indians are the model minority with the highest capita income, the best educational qualifications and the lowest crime rates. The median annual income for Indian American households is $100,000 compared to $53,600 for the general population
But as Trump has inadvertently reminded us the model minority isn’t as shiny-happy as we would like to think it is. Even in the model minority not everyone gets to be top model. Many desis were upset by the images of Indians in chains. Didn’t Donald Trump say not that long ago
DT1: India has never had a better friend than me
But when anti-immigrant fever rises, Desis are just as brown as anyone else.
Suketu Mehta in his book This Land is Our Land - An Immigrant’s Manifesto explains that the resistance to immigration in the USA is ultimately “an outgrowth of income inequality.” He says in the last three decades, the bottom 50 percent of American households saw zero growth. While the income of the top 1 percent jumped 300 percent. The migrants became the scapegoats or as Mehta writes “The safest thing for the rich to do is to say ‘Don’t blame us, blame them’ - pointing to the newest, the weakest the immigrants.” The west, he writes is being destroyed “not by migrants, but by the fear of migrants.”
Its not just in America. Immigrants are a bogeyman propelling parties to power all across Europe as well.
But it’s also true the new Second Lady is Indian American. As is the brand new FBI director Kash Patel who took office by swearing on the Hindu holy book the Gita,
KASH PATEL1: I am living the American dream. And anyone that thinks the American dream is dead. Just look right here. You're talking to a first generation Indian kid who's about to lead the law enforcement community, the greatest nation on God's green earth. That can't happen anywhere else.
The model minority American Dream story gets another feather in its cap.
But the shattered American Dreams of those other Indians in chains, the deportees so glaringly visible now, remind us that they too are indisputably part of the Indian story in America.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW