Allure of America: Gujaratis risk it all for dollars

A series of incidents involving residents from the western state has put illegal immigration to the US under spotlight

On January 12, 2022, four persons – a couple and their two children, including an infant – suddenly left Dingucha, a village in Gandhinagar district, Gujarat. Ten days later, Jagdish Baldeshbhai Patel, 39, Vaishaliben Patel, 37, Vihangi Patel, 11, and Dharmik Patel, 3, were found frozen to death on the US-Canada border.

According to reports, the four, part of a larger group of 11, were trying to illegally cross into the US, and are said to have walked in the forbidding terrain for several hours in sub-zero temperatures.

The incident sent shockwaves back home.

There was another sensational case this year. On February 13, the Gandhinagar Police acting on a complaint rescued 15 people from illegal confinement in Delhi. The complaint had been lodged by a father whose son and daughter-in-law were supposed to be taken to the US for a whopping Rs 1.35 crore but were kidnapped by agents.

They were the victims of a gang which had promised to help them immigrate to the US and extorted money from them.

The two incidents, separated by a month, have one thing in common: the United States of America.

Across Gujarat, the pull of America — the land of opportunity — is so overwhelming that men and women are willing to risk everything despite the dangers involved: death, imprisonment or being taken for a ride by conmen.

If police are to be believed, most cases like the one in Dingucha, where four members of a family froze to death, don’t reach them as the victims or their families don’t file complaints since the journey to enter the US illegally starts with their own consent.

“An average graduate may not even get a job of Rs 10,000 here, and even if one lands a job in cities like Ahmedabad, it is tough to survive and manage a family of four or five persons,” says a resident from Dingucha village, who now lives in the US with his family and visits his hometown every year.

The “American dream”, the NRI said, begins “when you know about a neighbour’s or a relative’s son or brother earning in dollars in the US without having any skill and who sends crazy amounts of money back home”.

Powerful bait

This is a powerful bait in villages where people don’t see much hope in government or private sector work and are
usually in thrall to wealth and social status.

As the NRI put it: “The attraction of dollars is so much that you are ready to put your life at risk.”

He said the only difficulty is reaching the destination. But once there, the diaspora in the respective countries takes care of everything else.

And that’s the reason why a poor couple wouldn’t blink twice to take a loan of over Rs 1 crore to pay the agents and set off on a perilous journey because they know they can pay it back within a year or two.

The NRI, who requested anonymity, had helped the family of four persons who were found frozen to death on the Canada-US border, a heart-wrenching incident that put the illegal immigration from Gujarat to the US under the international spotlight.

July brought to light another incident which revealed the ingenious ways of human traffickers.

Six youths, four of them from different villages in Mehsana, were caught by US border authorities while trying to cross over from Canada.

What’s unique in this case was that these students had scored highly in the International English Language Test System (IELTS), but when they were produced in court, they couldn’t speak a word of English, which baffled the judge.

During their investigation, the Mehsana Police found that four youths had appeared for the IELTS exam at a centre in Navsari town of south Gujarat. This shows how the IELTS centres have also been compromised and part of a larger scam involving admitting students to Canadian colleges and smuggling them to the US.

“The stories of illegal immigration are not new. Most of the houses in the district have similar stories,” says Dinesh Suthar, a BJP leader and panchayat member of Akhaj village in Mehsana.

According to him, “lack of jobs and the value of dollars are some of the reasons why youth from the district take life-threatening risks”.

A majority of these people are from the Patidar community, which has a large diaspora in countries like the US and the UK.

A senior policeman from CID (crime), who is investigating such cases, said an NRI has enormous “social prestige” among Patidars. “A local youth hardly has any future in the community if he is not rich or an NRI,” he added.

That explains the billboards and posters across north Gujarat, which boldly promise immigration to the gullible and the desperate “with/without IELTS study”.