NEW DELHI, Feb 2: The challenge of migration confronting the world was the topic of discussion at a book launch here with the participants looking at the human movement through diverse prisms.
Participating in the conversation around journalist-author Bhaskar Roy’s new book “Border Crossers” here on Friday, former Indian ambassador to the US Meera Shankar said that with President Donald Trump vowing a harsh crackdown on the undocumented emigres, “immigration has become a huge issue playing into white American anxiety about impending demographic change and browning of their society”.
Taking a broad perspective of the looming crisis, she stressed that the best guarantee against migration was to develop the neighbouring countries.
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The diplomat cautioned that though India had agreed to take back 18,000 purported undocumented migrants, “this process could prove difficult to navigate and hugely disruptive”.
Surveying the scenario in India’s neighbourhood, Shankar proposed a formalised work permit system for Bangladeshis to prevent illegal migration. She also held those guarding the borders for abetting migration by not discharging their responsibilities scrupulously.
Sanjeev Chopra, former director of Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, said migration cannot be stopped by policing alone.
He said instead of offering a solution to any issue, partition of the Indian subcontinent had actually opened up new areas of discord, distorting the social balance that evolved over the centuries.
He said that though the country’s borders had not yet been entirely fenced up, barbed wire along Punjab’s boundary with Pakistan solved many problems.
Roy said that hugely impressed by the diasporic writers’ love-and-longing-for-home stories which are an outcome of their cultural alienation, he had chosen to chronicle the narrative of the undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in India’s big cities.
Taking a wider view of the migration waves around the world, the author said that at a time when right-wing politics seemed dominant in many parts of the world, one tended to forget that the receiving cultures often benefited from the ‘boat people’ — the phrase referred to refugees who flee their country by sea.
He recalled that Dr Ugur Sahin, the German scientist behind the breakthrough Covid vaccine, is a Turkish migrant. (PTI)
