US Deports Indian Illegal Immigrants in Handcuffs and Chains Aboard Military Aircraft

[Riaz Haq]

A US Air Force transport plane landed in India today with 104 illegal Indian immigrants in handcuffs and shackles, according to media reports. Speaking with reporters, a deportee said: “For 40 hours, we were handcuffed, our feet tied with chains and were not allowed to move an inch from our seats. After repeated requests, we were allowed to drag ourselves to the washroom. The crew would open the door of the lavatory and shove us in.”

Illegal Indian Immigrants Deported in Handcuffs and Chains. Source: News18

The inhumane treatment meted out to citizens of India, a US ally, has sparked a lot of anger against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. The critics are citing the example of Colombia, a small South American nation, whose president protested similar treatment of its citizens by the Trump administration. Colombian President Gustavo Petro turned back the US military planes carrying deportees and then sent his own aircraft to transport them back home in Colombia. 

Illegal immigration from India to the US has dramatically increased on Prime Minister Modi's watch. A Pew Research Center report said that as of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, on the list of countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants — 725,000 — living in the U.S.

India has a serious unemployment problem, particularly for the young people entering the job market by the millions each year. This problem is concealed by headline  economic growth figures highlighted by the Modi government. At the same time, India is losing its best and brightest in a massive brain drain. 

"Leave India! It's High Time!!" screams out a recent Reddit post that has gone viral! The poster who claims to be an Indian entrepreneur warns of impending "terrible economic collapse" with a "massive depreciation of the Indian rupee".  

The now-deleted post, written by a user named ‘u/anonymous_batm_an,’ urges high-earning professionals, especially innovators, to leave India for countries with better opportunities and governance, as reported by the Times of India.  It recommends the UAE or Thailand as alternative destinations . The sentiments expressed in the post are already resonating with a large number of Indians.  The non-resident Indians now constitute the world's largest overseas diaspora. Every year, 2.5 million Indians leave their country of birth, making India the nation with the highest annual number of emigrants in the world. 

New Company Registrations in Dubai. Source: Khaleej Times

Indian investors continued to top the list of new non-Emirati companies joining the Dubai Chamber of Commerce during the first nine months of 2024. A total of 12,142 new Indian companies joined the chamber during the period, data showed on Monday, according to the Khaleej Times. Pakistan ranked second on the list with 6,061 new companies joining between Q1-Q3 2024, while Egypt followed with 3,611 new companies registering as members of the chamber. The number of new Syrian companies joining the chamber during the first nine months of the year reached 2,062, placing the country fourth among the top nationalities of new member companies.

India is losing its best and brightest to the West, particularly to the United States, at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2023 study of the 1,000 top scorers in the 2010 entrance exams to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) — a network of prestigious institutions of higher learning based in 23 Indian cities — revealed the scale of the problem. Around 36% migrated abroad, and of the top 100 scorers, 62% left the country, according to a report in the science journal Nature.  Nearly two-thirds of those leaving India are highly educated, having received academic or vocational training. This is the highest for any country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Example of The Great Indian Brain Drain. Source: Boston Political R...

Brain drain is defined as the loss of precious human capital of a nation. It is a “consequence of an education system designed for ‘selecting’ the best and brightest in an economy that is still too controlled and cannot create opportunities for its best and brightest”, according to Indian economist Shruti Rajagopalan. High-profile examples of India's human capital loss include Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Arvind Krishna (IBM) and Ajay Banga (World Bank). 

Foreign-Born STEM Workers in America. Source: American Immigration ...

Growing number of Indian students are going abroad for higher education each year and 90% of them never return home after completing their studies.  In 2022, the number of Indian students leaving the country for higher education reached a six-year high of 770,000. And a 2021 report estimated that around two million Indian students would be studying abroad by 2024. 

Many developing countries are experiencing brain drain. But India is losing its best brightest at a much faster rate than others. Some call it "The Great Indian Brain Drain". This is the reason why Indians in the United States are the best educated and the highest earning group.  In a recently published book titled "The Other One Percent", authors Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh explain this phenomenon. 

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