As everyone knows, the scene in front of any unreserved Indian rail compartment resembles a battlefield, with people huddled and fighting with one another to get into the train that usually accommodates double or more of its actual capacity. All those who finally manage to get in show unusual camaraderie; they protect their collective interest by tightly closing the door to stop the entry of new passengers at the next station and to protect their hard-earned space in the coach.
That remains their biggest priority throughout their journey. What the Republican presidential candidate Donald J Trump seeks to do, if elected, resembles just that. He assures the electorate of the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. He wants to send back 11 million people supposedly staying illegally in America; 75 per cent of them came before 2010 and some even before 1980. To pursue his goals of “strong border” and “zero tolerance”, he wants to use the police and military and invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. During his earlier presidential stint, Trump unsuccessfully tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children; the Supreme Court halted his move.
He also proposed limiting legal immigration, particularly by restricting family-based immigration and promoting merit-based immigration. But how could Mr Trump and the supporters of his anti-immigration policy forget the basic character of the United States of being a nation of immigrants which the Statue of Liberty standing tall at Liberty Island, New York harbour amply testifies? The inscription, the poem The New Colossus of Emma Lazarus, on the plaque affixed to the base of this statue says among other things: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”. It is an undeniable fact that America has been formed of the immigrant population. The Aboriginal population’s share in a total population of 331.46 million (2020 census) is less than 2 per cent.
Here is the racial composition for clearer assessment: The principal presidential candidates Trump and Kamala Harris are no exceptions to the racial family background. Kamala’s mother is an Indian (Madras province) born Shyamala Gopalan and her father Donald J Harris is a Jamaican American. While Trump’s mother is Scottish-American, his grandfather Fredrich Trump immigrated to New York in 1885 when he was 16 from Kallstadt in Palatine of RhinelandPalatinate, one of Germany’s 16 Federal States which was under the Kingdom of Bavaria. Fredrich Trump’s immigration was considered illegal as per the Kingdom of Bavaria’s law at that time because he did not serve two years of mandatory military service. This background should have made Trump empathetic to the immigrants. Not that outright illegality and crime can be condoned nor is border security unimportant; it is the legitimate and primary duty of the president to take care of these things.
But he should look at the root causes for the mass immigration efforts, the push factors like violence, abject poverty and unemployment in the countries people leave, and the pull factors like job opportunities and better living conditions in the US. There should be no alternative to dealing with human beings longing to migrate to the land of immigrants with utmost humanity and kindness instead of the repulsive actions of building walls on the borders, holding illegal immigrants in private detention centers and separating mothers and children in the name of protecting the borders. America, a modern and civilized society, a country that is known to be the world’s largest economy enjoying 26 per cent of global nominal GDP, should move further in altruism and hospitality from Emma Lazurus’ time and values.
Better to travel still backwards in time to the mahopanishad period, could be 2,500 years ago, which says it is narrow-mindedness to say this is mine and that is yours. On the contrary people with broad vision assert that the world is one family: ayam. nijah. paro veti gan. anã laghucetasãm| udãracaritãnãm. tu vasudhaiva kut. umbakam|| Instead of focusing on the immigration issue so much, the persons in the presidential race should have taken up the real challenges that Americans are facing now. For instance, gun violence is a major threat to the citizens in the US; there have been 385 mass shootings (in which four or more were killed per incident) so far this year in the US, reports BBC. For the last four years, 600 such incidents took place every year which means almost two a day! Gun-related injuries killed 48,830 in 2021.
Other issues include police reforms, healthcare (some Americans come to India for medical treatment which shows the poor state of the health sector there), and education (student indebtedness is distressing some 42.8 million people owe about $ 1.75 trillion as of 2023 in student loans). Similarly, poverty and homelessness are not the issues that can be ignored (there are 6,53,104 homeless in the US by January 2023, and about 3.7 crore people in the country live in poverty). Unfortunately, these issues did not get enough focus in the poll assurances as usual. Or, is it a deliberate ploy, to divert people’s attention from the real issues that bother them, by over-focusing on the immigration issue? (The writer is a development economist and a commentator on economic and social issues.)