By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, February 8: The United States is a land of immigrants. And yet there has been strong resistance to immigrants, especially of low skilled non-White people from the Global South.
Being the land of opportunity in a world that is generally impoverished and racked by conflict, people from poorer and politically unstable countries try to enter the US by fair means or foul. According to the US authorities, the total number of Indian illegal immigrants in the US are 170,000. But the Indian government disputes this figure saying it is an over estimate.
Although the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US is now identified with the two Trump Presidencies, successive US Presidents have also deported illegal immigrants, predominantly low-skilled non-Whites. These immigrants could not gel with the local culture or were taking away jobs from poor White Americans.
However, it is President Trump who is pioneering a policy of deporting illegal immigrants and hardened American criminals to another country which has not been a significant source of immigration. This country is El Salvador in Central America. Interestingly, El Salvador had offered to take the detainees including hardened criminals and American citizens.
Thus, El Salvador is set to emerge on the world map as a “penal settlement” which characterised the Colonial era. In the Colonial-era, Australia was a penal settlement for the British. So was the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, or Siberia in the days of the Soviet Union. The UK had recently planned to send illegal immigrants to Ruwanda in East Africa, but was thwarted by a court order.
Indian Illegal Immigrants in US
The data on the deportation of Indian immigrants by the US is revealing. There is a hue and cry now about 104 Indians who had been shackled, bundled into an US Air Force plane and sent off to India. But America has been quietly deporting Indians for years, and few in India or the US had noticed it.
The Indian Express reported that the Biden administration deported 2,71,484 illegal immigrants to 192 countries, higher than the 2019 tally of 2,67,258. The highest deportation count stood at 3,15,943 in Barack Obama’s second term in 2014.
Over the past 15 years, the US had deported over 15,000 Indian migrants, with the highest being in the year 2019 (2,042) under Trump’s watch.
According to US sources, the rise in deportations in 2014 could be attributed to successful negotiations with receiving countries, allowing them to increase the number of deportation flights. But New York Times said that the increase in deportations under the Biden administration was also due to the increased inflow of illegal migrants since he took office.
Most deportations under Biden were under “Title 42” which allowed authorities to expel migrants in the interest of public health. Title 42 came into force under the Trump administration in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Biden continued the practice till May 2023, when the public health emergency was lifted.
This year, Trump vowed mass deportation of “illegal aliens”, whom he often dubbed “criminals”. The Trump administration has been sending back these illegals in military planes, handcuffed and chained.
On arrival in India the 104 deportees told the media that they had paid up to INR 10 million (US$ 115,000) to agents who had taken them across 13 countries before pushing them into the US from either Canada or Mexico. Back in India, these deportees are to be investigated by the financial investigating agency, Enforcement Directorate (ED). The ED is reportedly already investigating 4,200 Indians for illegal migration to the US through the education route and suspicious financial transactions.
Prison Conditions in US
The other problem which is driving the US authorities to deport illegal immigrants and also other prisoners and detainees is overcrowding in the existing prisons and the high cost of running prisons.
In the 1980s the US began privatizing the detention of criminals and suspects. The prison system in the US is even now substantially privatised. The detention conditions are harsh as seen in the handcuffing and feet shackling of the 104 illegal Indian immigrants throughout their flight back to India.
According to Dr. Kristen M. Budd, in 2022, 27 American States and the US federal government had 90,873 people in private prisons in 2022, representing 8% of the total State and federal prison population. These private prisons are “for-profit” prisons.
States show significant variation in the use of private “for profit” prisons. At one end of the spectrum, Montana incarcerates almost half of its prison population in privately run facilities, but in another 23 states, private prisons are not used at all. A total of 27 states and the federal government use private corporations like GEO Group, Core Civic,2 LaSalle Corrections, and Management and Training Corporation to run some of their correction facilities Dr.Budd says.
Under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Homeland Security, there is an average of 28,289 people held daily in immigrant detention centres, 79% of these in privately-run facilities.
Despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants. No wonder, private prisons are now a 4 billion-dollar industry. The main goal of a private prison company is to maximize profit, and to maximize profit, it minimizes expenditure. The goal is to get more people in, hold them there for as long as possible and provide them with the barest necessities possible. But this is denied by the private prison companies.
Beyond pragmatic considerations, philosophical questions have dogged private prisons from the start. They boil down to the question: “If someone violates society’s code of behaviour, is it not up to the government to punish the offender as society’s guardian? How can government turn it over to a profit-seeking entity? “
New York Times quotes M. Wayne Huggins, Sheriff of Fairfax County, Va., asking in 1985: “What next will we be privatizing? Will we have private police forces? Will we have private fire departments? Will we have private armies?” Those questions have not disappeared.
The partnership with the private sector was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical. But unfortunately, these hopes are belied. There has been no effective monitoring and auditing of the private sector prisons. According to New YorkTimes, studies suggest that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits.
Writing in Indian Express, Sanjaya Baru says while the US is welcoming India’s talented and wealthy, India’s depressed and desperate are shunned. From India, both the rich and the poor are migrating to fresher pastures in very larger numbers.
The poor are trying to emigrate illegally, and the wealthy are migrating legally. Henley & Partners, a firm that describes itself as a “firm of global citizens” that assists clients acquire foreign citizenship and residence “through investment”, says that 6,500 wealthy Indians opted for paid emigration in 2022 and 4,300 in 2024.
Replying to a question in Parliament in August 2024, the Minister of State for External Affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, stated that a total of 225,260 Indians had “renounced their Indian citizenship” in 2022 and 216,219 in 2023. Taken together, a total of 1,880,559 Indians had given up their citizenship in the period 2011-23.
In his concluding remarks, Baru says: “Cross-border migration is a natural phenomenon that was made illegal only in the 20th century. Humans have moved through time in search of livelihood and opportunity. A large part of the White American population comprises Europe’s poor and desperate and not the European elites. European elite migration to the US is a 20th century phenomenon that began in the inter-war period and increased after that.”
“Initially, the shiploads that crossed the Atlantic were Europe’s marginalised and desperate. Tragically the America that was open to such people, seeking a better and freer life, is now shutting its doors to the world’s marginalised.”
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