No country for migrants: How the world has fallen out of love with immigration

From “world citizens” to “citizens of nowhere”, migrants have been on a long downhill journey amid a rising tide of xenophobia across the Western world. And now the world’s most powerful political leader has lent it new legitimacy. US President Donald Trump, whose public threat to deport one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs back to the country of his birth just because he no longer gets along with him, shows that the immigration debate has gone beyond just rhetoric: the bark has acquired a bite.

Trump has been so angered by Elon Musk’s criticism of his “big, beautiful” spending bill, which reduces subsidies to his electric car venture, Tesla, that he is considering terminating his American citizenship and sending him back to his native South Africa. Asked by reporters if he would deport Musk, Trump said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to take a look.”

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If the immigration status of the world’s richest man is not safe, it shows how vulnerable ordinary men must feel.

Musk may not be exactly a likeable person, and few would perhaps shed tears if he were to be deported. And in all probability nothing will happen to Musk. But it’s not about Musk. It’s about a climate in which the world’s most powerful executive thinks it’s amusing to threaten to upend real people’s lives. And that’s not funny. But it’s not just in America that immigrants are living on an edge.

In Britain, they were referred to as “citizens of nowhere” by erstwhile prime minister Theresa May while she sent vans around to immigrant neighbourhoods telling them to “go home” if they were illegal. But even “legals” are not safe, with immigration rules changing so frequently that one can never be sure what lies ahead. Among the hardest-hit are those who migrate through fast-track routes introduced from time to time and are then abruptly revoked, replaced by new rules applied even to those who are in the country legally.

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In one of the most controversial such cases, hundreds of Indian workers were forced to return home in the mid-2000s following arbitrary retrospective changes to residency rules for high-skilled immigrants. The new legislation was brought in, ignoring at least two high court rulings directing the Home Office to honour the original terms of migrants’ visas. Indians have also been disproportionately affected by the frequent tightening of student visa rules and intra-company transfers.

In recent years, foreign students have been stripped of a number of key entitlements, and there’s now a proposal for the graduate visa route to be scrapped except for those pursuing postgraduate research degrees.

Earlier this year, the government announced plans to reduce the length of time for which overseas students can live and work in the UK.

There’s already a ban on bringing dependents with them. Meanwhile, Indians seeking student visas are up against more hurdles, as India has been placed in the category of countries whose nationals are most likely to overstay and claim asylum. Applicants from these countries, which also include Pakistanis, Nigerians, and Sri Lankans, will be scrutinised more closely.

The crackdown comes amid government claims that study visas are being increasingly used as a backdoor into Britain’s creaking asylum system. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is concerned about a sharp increase in migrants who travel to Britain on study visas and, on their expiry, lodge asylum claims to extend their stay.

In short, there’s no place safe for those seeking to realise their “phoren” dream.

Recently, Russia-born Nobel Prize-winning Dutch physicist Andre Geim, who had been a Dutch citizen since the 1990s, was stripped of his citizenship on flimsy technical grounds.

A wave of intense anti-immigrant sentiment is sweeping the developed world, feeding off deepening public anger over the cost-of-living crisis and growing pressure on public services.

The narrative that foreigners are “stealing” local jobs and hijacking public housing has been so successfully sold that every immigrant has come to be viewed with suspicion.

Even the once relatively migrant-friendly countries like Britain, Germany, Denmark, Canada, Australia, and, of course, that supposed cradle of the “melting pot” revolution, the US, are turning hostile towards foreigners.

Yet there’s no let-up in the scramble to go abroad.

And it’s not just the unemployed and lowly workers desperately seeking a better future; curiously, even well-heeled professionals and the affluent class—the so-called “high net worth individuals”—are equally desperate to get out. And on hand to help them is a thriving cottage industry of immigration lawyers and consultants well-versed in bending rules.

This has triggered a debate in India on whether the flight of its professional elite constitutes a massive brain drain that should be discouraged or contributes to India’s soft power and needs to be encouraged.

“Is enhancing soft power a fair trade-off for losing valuable human capital?”, asks a new provocative book on the subject, Secession of the Successful: The Flight out of New India (Penguin/Viking) by noted journalist and academic Sanjaya Baru.

Baru argues that much of modern India’s development owes itself to the “contribution of hundreds of talented Indians who stayed home, some even returning home, to build a ’new India’ after Independence”.

“The ’temples of modern India’—the new research and teaching institutions, the public sector industries, the atomic energy and space capabilities, and so on—were built by Indian brains that chose to stay home,” he writes.

Those on the other side of the argument feel strongly that an expanding and resourceful Indian diaspora is good for India.

Besides lending heft to its soft power, it benefits the Indian economy through inward remittances.

There are calls for the creation of a Ministry of Emigration to support emigrants and tap their potential to the fullest.

However, these discussions are only a sideshow in the broader global debate on immigration driven by populist nationalists—pushing the issue to the top of almost every government’s agenda.

The following comment by Nicola Procaccini, a Member of European Parliament for Italy’s ruling Brothers of Italy, whose leader Giorgia Meloni is the country’s prime minister, sums up how the pendulum has swung against migrants. In an interview with the New York Times, he recalled that when he was first elected to the European Parliament six years ago, colleagues from centrist parties avoided even being seen with him. Brothers of Italy was then a fringe party whose hard-line stance on immigration was met with scorn.

“My hand would hang midair because they don’t shake hands with fascists… Now those tables have turned. Those who told us our approach was racist and xenophobic are slowly starting to say, ‘Well, maybe they’re a bit right,’” he said, noting that mainstream politicians are now embracing his party’s anti-migration agenda.

And he’s right. Nobody wants migrants anymore. But it seems migrants themselves still haven’t got the memo, judging from the continuing clamour to go abroad.

Hasan Suroor is author of ‘Unmasking Secularism: Why We Need A New Hindu-Muslim Deal’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.