Dear reader, just like you, I also use AI these days. I have subscribed to Perplexity primarily because a fellow (or former?) countryman, Aravind Srinivas, is the co-founder of the AI startup.
The word ‘diaspora’ is derived from a Greek term, which means scattering. I knew it already, but still wanted to be sure so I checked with Perplexity.
You can take your pick from historian Edward Gibbon’s published work on the Roman Empire. Perhaps it was Vespasian; perhaps it was Titus; perhaps it was Hadrian. In any event, one or more Roman imperators ordered the Jews to leave the province of Judea. Despite these edicts, some Jews stayed back even though they did not reside in areas from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south. A handful sheltered in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed, and by the Dead Sea. The vast majority was literally dispersed in different, even distant lands.
The modern use of the word ‘diaspora’ to describe people living away from their ancestral lands is, technically speaking, incorrect. Most of these people were not dispersed, they voluntarily migrated. Even the Indians who migrated as indentured labourers to Mauritius, Natal, Fiji, Trinidad, and Surinam can arguably be referred to as voluntary migrants. The only Indian-origin people who were forced into a diaspora were those who had lived in Uganda, where they were important economic agents, and were kicked out literally overnight. They “dispersed” to Britain, Canada and, of course, India. The Indians driven out from Burma (Myanmar), Aden (Yemen) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) actually did not “disperse”. They just returned to India. The Indians today in the US, Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand do not constitute a real diaspora. They are voluntary immigrants to the lands of their choice. But be that as it may. Since ‘diaspora’ is the word currently in fashion, let us just use it to describe persons of Indian origin in these countries.
The Indian diaspora is under attack, particularly in English-speaking countries. The current situation is vastly different from the ’90s when the author lived in Britain and the US. Then, the diaspora was emerging as a “model minority”, who came in legally, worked hard, were by and large law-abiding, were significant contributors to the economy, and who assimilated well into professional and business networks. That has all changed in a few decades. Indians are now seen as job-stealers, as racially and culturally incompatible, as scabs who take an axe to the wages of natives, and even as law-breakers — but not as peaceable law-abiding folks.
What has gone wrong?
The first thing is that numbers matter. When the number of immigrants is in thousands, even in tens of thousands, they remain unnoticed, and are literally under the radar. But when the numbers run into millions, these people form a good chunk of the population base. The situation then changes, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively too.
The second thing is that speed matters. It is one thing if millions of people of Indian origin had entered the US in a hundred years. But it becomes an entirely different matter if the numbers increase exponentially in two decades. And this hurried increase has happened in many countries. This automatically draws attention of the unwanted and undesirable kind to people who look different and in fact are different.
Thirdly, success can be a double-edged sword. Successful, tax-paying persons were admired earlier. Now, successful people breed envy and resentment — two of the oldest human emotions. A few decades ago, there were probably only a few Indian-origin CEOs in the US. But today, the number may have crossed 50, with many not even in the proverbially Indian-infested tech sector. Envy and resentment cannot and should not be underestimated.
I recently read the book Europe Against the Jews: 1880–1945 by German scholar Gotz Aly. It is a really fascinating book. It points out that the dislike for Jews was not an exclusively German or Nazi phenomenon. Consider a country like Romania. We know little about it, except for answering quiz questions about its capital Bucharest. After World War I, when European and Middle Eastern maps were redrawn, it turned out that about 4.5 per cent of Romania’s population was made up of Jews. They had a reputation of being peaceful and law-abiding. But as subsequent events proved — tragically for them — these Jews were successful.
A vast number of the doctors in Romania were Jews. Non-Jewish Romanians, especially the doctors among them, envied and resented this situation. So, under pressure, the Romanian parliament passed laws severely restricting Jews from getting admission to medical colleges. Many Romanian Jews went to countries like France and obtained medical degrees. Presto! A new law was passed that Jews with foreign degrees could not work as doctors in Romania. Non-Jewish Romanians could do so. Aly’s book is important because it highlights that for minorities being peaceful and law-abiding was not an antidote for the disease of success. It also points out that excessive representation in specific professions can become an albatross. Do you want to think about computer programmers in a country very far from Romania?
Britain and Canada are good examples of places that demonstrate that it is better for minorities to be law-breakers and violent than to be peaceable. In Britain, multiple government agencies have known for decades that grooming or raping was an organised crime racket with mostly Pakistani Muslim immigrants behind it. They preferred to use euphemisms like “British persons” or “Asians”. And when the government finally admitted — after years of disingenuous avoidance — that they were Pakistanis, the authorities conveniently glossed over the fact that the small number of Pakistani Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs who had migrated to Britain were not involved in these gang crimes. The conclusion that Pakistani immigrants in Britain (sadly, even the non-violent law-abiding ones) have come to is that violence pays. Minorities can intimidate the state and society at large, if they don’t pay taxes, if they break laws, and if they are violent. And the state-owned BBC is the easiest organisation to intimidate and blackmail.
Canada is worse than Britain. It is not just naivete or political correctness at play here. There is a malignant organ inside the Canadian body politic. For years, they have known, or should have known, that Khalistanis are dangerous gun-runners, drug smugglers, and human traffickers; they should have known that Islamists kill young Baluchi women in Canada, infiltrate the Canadian media, are paid agents of Hamas, are far from being law-abiding, and that their covert and not-so-covert objective is to subvert Canadian laws. The Canadians have ignored all this. And now that immigrant numbers have gone out of control, guess who is at the receiving end of racist immigrant-bashing tropes? The hapless peaceful tax-paying Indians of course. And violent groups who manipulate the political discourse, continue to be treated with kid gloves.
Also read: A social contract protected Indians abroad as the ‘model minority’. It’s tearing now
Flawed systems
Let us take a look at the visa regimes of these countries. If they had planned for a disaster, they could not have done a better job. The H-1B visas in the US were started in order to attract talent that was missing in the US. Left-dominated Democratic administrations forgot or chose to forget that employers will pay for talent. Instead of a market-driven auction or reverse auction process, the US established an absurd “lottery process” in the interests of “equity”, another ridiculous Left expression.
Now, anybody who has watched a Hollywood movie knows that there are clever sting operators who try to beat the casino. If the casino is run by an incompetent government agency — is there a redundancy there? Are not all government agencies incompetent? — then of course, the system will be gamed. Now look at the consequences. Because the people gaming and abusing the system manage to obtain 10-20 per cent of the visas, legitimate entrants come under a cloud and thousands of good professionals end up becoming targets. Many may object to the manner in which recent announcements have been made regarding H-1B visas.
I am relieved that the lottery is being abandoned and that market mechanisms are getting into play. If an employer is unwilling to pay $100,000 which is annually $33,000 when amortised over three years or $16,000 when amortized over six years for a talented employee, then perhaps that immigrant is not that valuable. The more important thing is that unfair practices like overstating credentials, falsifying degrees, underpaying vulnerable immigrants, arbitraging labour markets with minimal value addition will go away, because an employer who pays a significant sum will automatically do all the due diligence that is required. And again, the US government cannot claim that they were not warned. This writer remembers speaking to a senior official of the US Trade Representative and pleading for a rational Guest Worker programme for Indian IT professionals. The response was tepid, and my inputs went unheard. The consequences are terrible. The victims are all Indian IT professionals, in fact all Indian-origin persons in the US — not US government bureaucrats — who knew or should have known when they were told that their system was fatally flawed.
Now let us turn to Canada, my favorite whipping boy. The Canadian government introduced a thoughtless student visa program and actually advertised it as a pathway to permanent residence. In a matter of a few weeks, dozens of so-called “colleges” opened up all over Canada. They “generously” gave admissions to unqualified prospective “students” and collected “fees” from them. The colleges did not bother to teach anything because they did not see it as their role. These colleges set up “recruitment agents/brokers/fixers/human traffickers” — call them whatever you want in India.
Canada had an overstaffed embassy in New Delhi and an overstaffed consulate in Chandigarh, where many of the human traffickers operated. But these Left-wing bureaucrats kept issuing “student visas” while all along knowing that the whole affair was a racket. Presto! Thousands of Indian “students” turned up in Canada with full confidence that they would eventually become legal residents and even citizens in their new country. The state-subsidised Canadian media completely ignored the abuses of the system that were so blatant and in-your-face. When Indian-origin journalists and podcasters talked about the scandalous state of affairs, they were ignored by Canadian mainstream media and the government. The situation was so bad that many of the so-called students were being exploited by sex trafficking gangs. The much-vaunted Canadian police chose to ignore this too. Again, look at the consequences. Who suffers? Today there is a spike in racist attacks against all Indian immigrants.
Although not as egregiously bad as Canada, Australia too has had a similar student-resident programme that has been gamed and abused. As their numbers have risen, all Indian-origin immigrants have become objects of suspicion and dislike. Australia also has the dubious distinction of encouraging Hamas supporters to enter the country legally.
Britain cannot be far behind in its stupidity. Suella Braverman, who had a tempestuous time as Home Secretary, has gone on record that the lefty British bureaucracy and cowardly Members of Parliament undermined all her efforts to rationalise British immigration rules. If Braverman or any of her friends reads this column, she might see her frustration as justifiable. I personally know a young woman in India who used to work as a secretary. She is now in Britain as a “caregiver”, whatever that means. She has no background or credentials in nursing or in “giving care” of any kind. But she found a broker/fixer/human-trafficker in India who got all her paperwork through in a jiffy.
She is now in Britain and when she writes to me, she complains about the weather (in this regard, one can argue that she has assimilated). Very soon, she will become a resident. She plans to “sponsor” her spouse and her children. Now don’t tell me that MI6 and MI5, the Circus, and the Home Office do not know about this ludicrous “caregiver” racket. But none of those Applebys are going to suffer. The backlash is going to hurt all Indians, even if they are valuable AI-trained software professionals, or for that matter have lived in Britain for 50 years. The general public cannot differentiate between Pakistani groomers/rapists, bogus caregivers, and law-abiding, tax-paying, brown-skinned folks.
Also read: The silence of Indian-Americans: Be Indian when going is good, American when things aren’t smooth
What matters
If all this was not sufficient, let us look at the gross and abject failure of these countries to control illegal immigration. They have opened their borders to wanderers, stragglers, fraudulent asylum-seekers and many more. Again, they cannot say that they have not been warned. I don’t know about other countries. But one can speak about India. We are not by any means a country from which an asylum-seeker needs to run, if for no other reason than that we are incompetent and casual about everything.
We give the death sentence to a criminal and we let him live for 20 years and more. We have a prominent politician who has openly said on TV that he takes money and issues letters on his official letterhead to anyone seeking asylum elsewhere stating that the individual is being persecuted in India. And he does not even take a lot of money for each letter. He is an el cheapo. This politician, by the way, did not go to jail; in fact he was in Parliament until recently, which, of course, might raise the mischievous question about what constitutes the difference, and here I need to be careful about defamation and sedition laws. Now how can anyone claim asylum running away from such a soft, indulgent state? I am sure many, if not most, asylum-seekers from other countries are also simply seeking to game the system for their benefit. And all the time, the mainstream media refuses to refer to bogus asylum-seekers as frauds. Apparently, they are humanitarian cases, whatever that means.
Illegal immigrants are whitewashed in the US by referring to them quaintly as “undocumented persons”, as if these are just law-abiding folks who misplaced their credit cards. Asylum-seekers get to stay for years on end as their requests and multiple endless appeals are being dealt with. In the meantime, in the US, they get welfare payments, emergency medical treatment, and in many states they get drivers’ licences without having to pass tests. (Even notoriously inefficient Mumbai has used digital technologies to make this pretty impossible in the city). When such drivers kill people, the ire descends on the entire Indian community.
Till recently, persons of Indian origin who were illegally in Britain or in the US were by and large those who had entered legally and who had overstayed their visas. In recent times, as Britain has started welcoming illegal boats instead of sending them back, the usual suspects — agents/fixers/traffickers — have marketed “boat travel” vigorously in India, and many of our countrymen have fallen for this. During the Biden administration, it was common for these agents/fixers/traffickers to loudly advertise the Mexican route to potential illegal migrants from India. So, suddenly illegal Indians in substantial numbers started turning up on the southern borders of the US.
One can only conclude that the law enforcement and judicial organs in the US, Canada, and Britain are not stupid; they are delusional and borderline insane. Again, look at the consequences. If you are in Britain, walking down a street in your hometown which has completely changed since your boyhood days, can you tell the difference between a legal bogus caregiver, a legal high-value AI geek, and an illegal fraudulent asylum-seeker? If you are in Canada, can you tell the difference between a human-trafficking racketeer, a bogus college student, and a respectable doctor. For heaven’s sake, they all have brown skin, and they look alike.
To conclude: Let us not be surprised about the backlash. The reasons are many. On the legal side, it is the operation of unbelievably silly immigration visa rules. On the illegal side, it is the fact that these Anglophone countries have for some years descended into insanity.
But all of that does not matter. Numbers do. And the numbers are getting very large. Speed matters. If things happen over a century, they are accepted. If numbers grow very fast in just a few decades, it creates a logic of its own. Success matters. Success breeds envy and resentment, which are old human responses that do not go away easily. While there is no reason to panic right away, we cannot forget Uganda, Aden, and Burma. Anything can happen. It still pays to maintain a low profile, be law-abiding, tax-paying, and perhaps only moderately successful. And remember that unlike the Romanian Jews in the 1920s, our people do have a country and a homeland that they can come to when all else fails.
Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
A balanced article that looks at all factors. In contrast to an earlier article by Karanjeet Kaur that was essentially a rant against the behavior of a small number of Indians.
Undeveloped Socialist India and over immigration are the two wrongs