While right-wing politicians in destination countries reap the electoral benefits of demonizing ‘illegal’ immigrants, their economies are in dire need of a cheap and docile foreign workforce.

Since the first US military aircraft carrying 104 deported Indians landed in Amritsar on February 5, a slew of comments has emerged in the Indian media addressing the inhumane condition of the deportees’ transportation and the response (or lack of) of the Indian authorities.

Many heart-wrenching stories have been published about the infamous dunki route taken by the deportees, the sacrifice of their families, including selling land, to send them abroad. Their socio-economic profiles and reasons for migration have also been highlighted.

As a scholar who has worked for 25 years on the Sikh diaspora, I found that though interesting, these stories miss a very important point — migration is not per se a criminal activity. It has been projected as a criminal activity recently in the countries of destination of migrants. In the US, it has been done mainly since 9/11. But in Europe, the process had started earlier in the context of the dismantling of EU’s internal borders and the fortification of its external ones.

Indeed, because of the seemingly unstoppable wave of populist anti-immigrant discourse and the resultant increasingly restrictive border regimes, illegality, criminality and a sense of threat have become the dominant lens through which the state in the destination countries sees migrants from the Global South.

Let me argue here that we should apply a different lens and try to change the narrative around international migration and humanize it. To start with, we must change our terminology. Many scholars and activists promote the use of ‘undocumented’ migrants, which is a more neutral term, instead of ‘illegal’ migrants, which stigmatizes and criminalizes mobile people.

The lack of humanity and dignity during the horrendous 40-hour journey of the deportees, turbans removed, handcuffed and even leg-chained like criminals is for all to see, except for the Indian government, which seems to find not much wrong with the criminalization and dehumanization of its own citizens.

In contrast, Colombian President Gustavo Metro strongly protested against the way the deportations were carried out, stressing the need to treat the deportees with dignity and respect. Initially, he even denied entry to two US flights before backing down, when threatened by Trump of a 50 per cent rise in tariffs on Colombian imports. Among the reasons for the lack of a strong response by Delhi seems to be a bid to placate the US government and protect H-1B visas for skilled Indian migrants. This narrative of skilled (read ‘good’, ‘wanted’) vs unskilled (read ‘bad’, ‘disposable’) migrants is used in many destination countries to exploit the latter and deprive them of basic human rights.

In her book on the experience of foreign workers in Qatar (Does Skill Make Us Human? Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond, Princeton University Press, 2021), US scholar Natasha Iskander argues that the notion of skill is a political tool, defining the rights foreign workers have access to.

While right-wing politicians in destination countries reap the electoral benefits of demonizing ‘illegal’ immigrants, their economies — particularly the construction, services and care sectors — are in dire need of a vulnerable foreign workforce. ‘Illegal migration’ is not a natural category. It is a political construct, an instrument that serves a purpose: of disciplining and coercing a docile and cheap immigrant labor force into accepting what sociologists call 3 Ds (dirty, dangerous, demeaning) jobs, shunned by the national population.

The hypocrisy of anti-immigrant rhetoric is probably best exemplified by none other than Trump himself. As reported by The Washington Post in 2019, his holding company, the Trump Organization, has employed for nearly two decades dozens of undocumented Latin-American construction workers at several properties owned by the company. And, guess why? Because they are cheap, hardworking and too afraid of deportations to complain about a back-breaking, harassing work.

Here, one needs to understand why ‘unskilled’ men and women from the Global South keep migrating to the Global North despite the increasingly expensive and dangerous journeys they are compelled to take due to the stringent immigration policies enforced by the destination countries.

There are multiple reasons for the life-changing decision that emigration entails. They encompass a combination of push factors (socio-economic or political conditions in the country of origin) and pull factors (what attracts people in the country of destination).

To put it bluntly, one major reason lies with the continuous economic and demographic demand for cheap migrant labor in the Global North despite the anti-immigration rhetoric. Take my own country, France. Who looks after our elderly, who cleans hotel rooms, collects garbage, builds bridges, schools, housing complexes, delivers our orders? Immigrants, of course. And, many of them irregular. They neither come to live on social benefits nor to steal the jobs of the French, as the far-right would have it.

Mobility is not a crime. It is a natural human urge. Crossing an international border shouldn’t mean losing one’s basic rights and dignity. Migrants, whether skilled or unskilled, are not criminals.

A hateful narrative dehumanizing immigrants has become all too common in many western countries. In a debate with Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, Trump went as far as to refer to Haitian refugees in Ohio as “eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Many people and advocacy groups oppose this rhetoric in the West. They argue that border enforcement policies are devastating for migrants, costly for the country of destination and ultimately ineffective because regardless of the risks, people will continue to move as they have done throughout human history.

In the case of Punjabis, mass migration was triggered and organized by the British rule to its own advantage. This colonial engineering created a deeply embedded culture of migration that no deportation, no border regime and no walls will be able to uproot.
(Christine Moliner is Associate Professor, OP Jindal Global University)