H-2B or not to be: a cautionary tale

The Digital Alarmist

If you were to quiz any IT worker in Bengaluru or Hyderabad on the H-1B or H-2B visa programmes for temporary workers in the US, chances are excellent that the worker will be able to quote chapter and verse the myriad rules and regulations governing the obtaining of said visas and extensions thereof. However, when you ask the worker about H-2A visas, you will be met with a blank stare. Since these H-2A visas are for agricultural workers, mostly drawn from Central America and the Caribbean, why care about Latino and Jamaican farm workers as long as there is food on the table, right? Frogs in wells know nothing of the sea, so goes the Chinese proverb.

While the holders of H-2B visas may consider themselves immune from the atrocities visited upon the H-2A workers on an almost daily basis, they will not feel so smug once they are made aware of the intricacies surrounding the ugly immigration game that has been in play in the US for almost two centuries, a game that is going to get even uglier, should Donald Trump regain the White House, come November 2024.

Whenever Trump rails against immigrant groups, mostly from Central America and certain Muslim countries, by characterising them as murderers, rapists, criminals and non-humans who were destroying the blood of the US, he is not being all that original. Such anti-immigrant rhetoric has been employed before by other politicians but directed at other ethnic groups at different times, but with entirely predictable consequences -- passage in the US Congress of blatantly racist immigration legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Prescott Hall, one of the founders of the Immigration Restriction League (1894), the first anti-immigrant think-tank in the United States, was “convinced that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.” Likewise, in 1915, questioning the real and imagined divided political loyalties of immigrants and ethnic groups, President Woodrow Wilson warned against hyphenated Americans who, he charged, had “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.”

When statements such as those made by Trump, Hall and Wilson are given extensive coverage in major newspapers, they only serve to poison, not so much the blood that courses through our veins, but the political climate influencing immigration policies.

According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website, of the 53 countries eligible to participate in the H-2A visa programme, just three are in Africa (South Africa, Mozambique and Mauritius) and three in Asia (Singapore, Thailand and South Korea); the rest are in Europe and South America. Curiously enough, migrants from Central America, be they farm workers or asylum-seekers, are stopped at the US-Mexico border while agricultural workers from Europe can freely avail themselves of H-2A visas which go unused. Meanwhile, Honduran, Salvadoran and Guatemalan labourers continue to pick the fruits and vegetables which stock the shelves of grocery stores across America.

Stephen Miller, who served as Trump’s speech-writer and principal adviser on immigration during the latter’s 2017-2020 tenure in the White House, and is expected to serve in an equivalent capacity should Trump regain the White House in 2024, openly advocates the building of mass deportation camps to temporarily hold illegal immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, and sending asylum-seekers to third countries while their asylum claims are being adjudicated. Miller was the architect of separating children from their parents who had illegally entered the US, if only to send a ‘message ‘ to would-be emigres at the US-Mexico border waiting to get into the US. It might be educational for Miller, who is Jewish, to become familiar with what happened in Germany during the 1930s and 40s. Incidentally, Miller’s ancestors sought asylum in America during the pogroms carried out in the early 1900s in what is now the country of Belarus.

In his New York Review of Books essay, ‘The Truths of Our American Empire’, author Hector Tobar describes US immigration policy as one focused on nation-building and race engineering. Whether it is the Chinese coolies who built the railroads in California, only to be later expelled from the country, or the Mexican labourers who, after having built the irrigation canals and farming infrastructure which made Texas and California enormously rich, were subject to mass deportations in the 1930s, the end result has always been the same -- America wins, the labourers lose.

Will India’s H-1B workers, or for that matter, Indian immigrants, be treated any better once their services are no longer needed? Given their skin colour, their religion, their dietary habits, their saris and their rather unusual name structures, I am not all that hopeful.