Shifting ground

A rich and compelling story of migrant crisis, this one crosses borders, and is born out of ‘sorrow and rage’, writes Ramakrishna Upadhya

From the earliest times, the human migration from one place to another has been a natural phenomenon, though the reasons or compulsions or provocations might have changed from time to time. But, in the present era of information explosion, which has helped spreading misinformation and disinformation than ever before, immigration has turned a hot button subject, especially in the ‘rich’ countries.

Author, journalism professor Suketu Mehta’s latest book, This land is our land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto offers a clinical insight into waves of migrations over the last 100 years or so, and makes a convincing argument
as to how they have actually benefited the host countries as also why the general xenophobia is wholly misplaced. Drawing on his own family’s experience of moving from India to Britain and the United States in 1970s, Mehta recounts how the West has gradually moved from welcoming the immigrants, albeit for its own selfish reasons, to resisting and detesting them, out of unfounded fear and prejudice.

Mehta meticulously traces the causes of post-modern immigration to war and strife, slavery of different kinds, the unbridled plundering of resources during colonialism in much of Asia and Africa, and the blunders committed by the colonialists in recklessly redrawing boundaries before
their departure.

Recounting the history of India’s partition, he points out that over 14 million people had to leave everything and move across the ‘Radcliffe Line’ in a matter of weeks and in the ensuing violence, two million people died “thanks to disastrous lack of foresight” on the part of the British colonisers. He adds, “The legacy of that botched map-making still haunts the two billion people of the region.”

Pointing out that 40% of all boundaries in the entire world today were redrawn by just two countries, Britain and France, Mehta says, the case of Africa was even worse than South Asia and the Middle East. The straight-line borders arbitrarily carved out by the colonisers before they left have resulted in constant conflict among the many tribes, while the military dictators who have replaced the colonisers have been co-opted by the rich countries to continue their plunder through multinational corporations.

Mehta’s narration is enriched with enthralling stories of individual heroes or tragedians. There is Favoui, a middle-aged woman from the oil-rich Delta state in Nigeria, who has escaped the unleashing of murder, rape and torture of the citizens by the Nigerian military, to somehow eke out a living in Europe. He quotes the uncovering of documents by Amnesty International in 2017 pertaining to Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Shell’s complicity in the torture of citizens who had participated in non-violent campaign against the company’s exploitative practices. Shell has so
far extracted over $30 billion in oil, while the Nigerian people not only remain poor, but many are forced to migrate to escape from violence.
While the current US president, Donald Trump, has justly attracted a lot of flak for his proposal to build a wall along the border with Mexico, the author draws attention to the fact that it was the Clinton administration that first erected a fence between the US and Mexico in 1994 and a ‘liberal’
Barrack Obama added a second fence in 2009.

Besides the role of illegal movement of drugs and guns in the immigration of people, Mehta points to a more powerful reason for the Mexicans’ urge to cross the border: “Between 1970 and 2010 Mexico lost $872 billion in illicit financial outflows and most of the money ended in the American banks. Around this time, 16 million Mexicans immigrated to the US. They weren’t doing anything wrong. They were just following the money. Their money.”

The usual arguments against the immigrants are that they take away the jobs from natives; that they contribute to increase in crime rate and that they bring in an alien culture. Mehta refers to the largest ever study of 41 million immigrants and their 37 million children in the US by the
National Academy of Sciences in 2015 to debunk each of these claims.

Pointing out that the immigrants often take up jobs that the locals don’t want or can’t fill, he says the recent immigrants adopt ‘the American way of life’ much faster than those who came in earlier, and, “... by the third generation, most immigrant children speak only English and their assimilation into America is so complete that their crime, health, divorce and education rates are the same as the native born. They sit around on the couch, watch TV and grow obese, work or not work, study or not study.... at the same rate as native born. In other words
they become fully American.”

Mehta says that more people are migrating today than ever before and there are now a quarter of a billion people who live in a different country to the one they were born in. He warns that the effects of climate change will make more people to move away from climate-related extreme events like floods and droughts.

The writer makes a compelling case for the international community to recognise immigration as a global problem and strive to find global solutions.