Skip to main content

Crossing The Border

Coming as I do from a family of refugees from Bangladesh displaced by partition and settled in India for a couple of generations, immigration legal, illegal, enforced or by choice is always of interest to me. My ancestors were driven out of their homeland and had to start their lives over in a new country. Years after the 1947 refugee crisis was over, the tide of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to West Bengal rises unabated.

The semi-porosity of the international border and the government's studied indifference to the problem only helps these people who desperately seek a better life. Once in India, they form a formidable vote-bank that no political party can afford to alienate itself from. They derive their strength in their large, undocumented numbers and just for that reason the free flow from across the border will never stem.

Anyone who has spent time in West Bengal knows that an impoverished neighbor and electoral math involving illegal immigrants is a lethal combination. We bemoan the state's appalling lack of infrastructure and how it is the least favored destination for domestic or international investors. We watch helplessly as the swelling ranks of illegals overtake what little the state has got left - it is akin to watch a parasite grow so large that it kills the host it feeds on. We wait for that slow death to deliver our state form its delibitating status quo.

The storm of protests over the US immigration bill fills me with deja vu. With some variations, there is the same fatal mix of an impoverished neighbor and electoral math. Only in India illegal immigrants would not so boldly proclaim that an enforcement-only policy is not acceptable to them. Also, in India we do not have a large body of people working diligently through legitimate channels to acquire permanent residency and citizenship.

Granting any form of general amnesty to illegal immigrants in America is a slap on the face of those who have and are pursuing the long, arduous and mind-numbingly painful immigration process. It is as much a mockery of the immigration system in this country as it is of all those who are involved in it.

The real solution lies in eliminating the root cause of such exodus from one country to another - in helping the impoverished , sometimes relatively dysfunctional neighbor improve their lot and set their house in order, so their people would have no incentive left to cross the border. Because once they do and their numbers swell to 11 million and over, the electoral math will render it impossible to remediate the situation as is evident in the ongoing struggle with the immigration bill.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more