Can Trump sustain the immigration crackdown?

Businesses are unlikely to fully back the deportations but the fear of stigma and racial profiling is real.

The world watches aghast as Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, runs riot. From an Indian perspective, the immediate fallouts stem from the evolving US immigration policy enforcement, given that an estimated four million Indians live and work in the US.

This makes Indian Americans the second largest immigrant group in the US, after Mexicans. But Indians are also said to be the third largest group among unauthorised immigrants in the US, behind those from Mexico and El Salvador, according to the Pew Research Centre. The number of such Indians is estimated to be between 725,000 (by Pew) and 375,000 (by the US-based Migration Policy Institute – MPI).

The term being used for this category now is “illegal aliens”, a derogatory and dehumanised framing that was banned under President Joe Biden but is now back in use under Trump. A January 26 statement by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spoke of raids to keep “potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities”.

Under Biden, the preferred usages were “undocumented non-citizen”, “undocumented non-US citizen” or “undocumented individual”, in line with the US seeing itself as “a nation of opportunity and welcome”. All that is history as the ICE police acquire a new and nasty edge, raiding homes, schools, bars, and places of worship.

Any mass operation of this kind will tend to stigmatise all Indians as the license to question, search and detain people is interpreted and executed in a variety of ways that inevitably lead to racial profiling, reinforcing negative stereotypes with minority groups as targets. All Indians save those at or near the top of the socio-economic ladder may well be living under a shadow of suspicion already. This marks a remarkable fall for a land where Indians are among the most visible and most successful group of immigrants working often in mid and senior roles in corporate America and the vast services sector.

Reports coming in about “raids” on gurdwaras across the US in the search for undocumented Indians only serve to underline the severity of the strain that Indo-US goodwill and diplomatic relations will soon come under if the trend continues beyond its initial frenzy and zeal. Already, we have on hand the reported deportation of some 18,000 Indians who allegedly are illegal migrants, so declared before Trump took office.

On a national scale, the number is insignificant, but this is just the beginning, and it speaks of the speed and efficiency with which the process of deportations will likely play out in the US. The manner and time in which the 18,000 are deported can serve to embarrass the Narendra Modi government and hurt Indo-US ties. It will bring new questions for an image-sensitive government that projects India as a growth engine while an increasing number of Indians, as alleged by the US, look to settle in a foreign land. For now, India is right in asserting that it will take back deportees after verifying that they indeed are Indian citizens.

It’ll need deft diplomacy to negotiate relationships with a mercurial Trump, who will likely fire away on multiple fronts, notably the threat of new tariffs and barriers and the scope and size of the H-1B visa programme where Indians are the top baggers. One response would be to lie low, to bide time, and to allow Trump to settle.

His bark may well be worse than his bite though the world and India must be prepared for nasty surprises. Do note that among recent presidents, it was Barack Obama rather than Trump in his first term who deported the most people. Obama stands with the title of “Deporter-in-Chief”, but this was achieved as part of a carefully laid out policy rather than wildcat raids or arrests.

The market decides

Modelling how Trump’s push will play out or how many people will be deported has little value since the subject, Trump, remains tricky, unpredictable, and fickle-minded. He may do irreparable damage, and yet, he may not make much of a difference given that the flow of immigrants is essentially dictated by the market.

Immigrants move to the US for a better life, but this push will have no impact without the strong pull from the US market that accommodates workers for economic reasons. They are a) available for hire, b) are cheaper to hire, c) are diligent and dependable, and d) are willing to put in extra hours. At the mid and lower rungs, they are also exploited, bringing unparalleled benefits for hirers.

So for purely selfish reasons, business lobbies may not be supportive of the raids for long. Yet, there remain the underlying risks of white supremacists in powerful positions leading deportation operations that will leave many scars on the Indian American population – the most successful and productive of immigrant groups.

Reports coming in from the US have already raised concerns within that country on US citizens being detained, questioned without access to a lawyer, and allowed to go after several hours of detention. As of now, raids continue to expand in response to demands from the new administration that more numbers should be rounded up. Yet, such blunt instruments rarely succeed.

In 1902, the US Commissioner General of Immigration, Terence Powderly, called for stricter health controls on immigrants at a time of peak migration; during 1880-1924, 23.5 million immigrants came to the US, mostly through Ellis Island in the New York harbour – a port of immigration that was busy and corrupt.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1902, appointed a young lawyer, whose job it became “to root out dishonest inspectors who had been bilking immigrants of money in exchange for fraudulent naturalisation papers,” writes Prof Alan M Kraut, an MPI fellow. America has, of course, come a long way from 1902, or has it?

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR; Syndicate: The Billion Press)