A quiet racism, enduring though unnamed:
How the immigration backlog controls Indians
In 2017, during the first months of Donald Trump’s Presidency, two Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, were shot at a bar in Kansas. Srinivas died. The murder was deemed a hate crime, though Trump’s supporters denied that his anti-immigrant rhetoric had anything to do with empowering such acts.
Srinivas’ story was covered in the new documentary ALIEN: A Documentary about Legal, High-Skilled Immigrants in the US by Vidyut Latay. It followed the stories of several Indian families in the U.S. who, despite public perception, face the threat of deportation, family separation, and labor exploitation. When Srinivas was killed, his wife’s immigration status was suddenly thrown into flux, which calls to attention the silent absurdity of our “legal immigration system.”
The topic receives little attention compared to undocumented immigration. I attended the first public screening of ALIEN and it was extraordinarily enlightening. My only critique is I wish the elephant in the room was named out loud: racism. Indians and South Asians face a certain kind of racism in the West, maybe not as overt as racism against Black lives, but still a real structural racism nonetheless. It is a quiet form for racism, enduring since the times of colonization, yet it often goes unnamed.
America’s perception of Indians is high-skilled labor in tech, engineering, and medicine. What is not seen is how many Indians must rely on H1-B visas, which tie them indefinitely to their workplace for sponsorship, and can sometimes feel like indentured servitude.
The beginning of the documentary introduces a family whose status is tied to the father’s H1-B. He has waited decades for his green card. Without the card his daughter, Sita, will become eligible for deportation when she turns 21. There is a touching scene where the family cries together as they discuss the stress they feel under this system. Only at the end do we learn if the green card came through in time. ALIEN wants you to taste what it’s like to sit with the uncertainty for so long.
For another couple, the husband’s company refuses to ever promote him, using his non-citizen status as an excuse, as if to say, ‘Just be thankful you get to live in this country with your wife because we’re sponsoring your visa.’ His “high-skilled labor” is treated like high-skilled exploitation. The company can make him do the same work as his American colleagues for less pay since he doesn’t have the freedom to easily quit without putting his status at risk.
Girish and Ketaki, a highly entrepreneurial Indian couple, decide to move to Canada after struggling for many years to maintain their visas in America’s Kafkaesque immigration system. Previously Girish’s work-permit was not renewed due a technicality, even after many years of contributing to the US economy. Since he could no longer earn money, he designed a free app which caught fire, becoming so popular it got bought out by another company. The Indian creator never made a dime off his own intellectual property.
When Girish and Ketaki apply to move to Canada, the whole process takes just a few weeks, demonstrating that America’s system does not have to remain as convoluted as it is. Girish says:
“We wanted to be Americans, but this country doesn’t want us.”
ALIEN explained that the current system distributes employment-based green cards equally but not equitably by setting a 7% cap per country. Since total applications surpass the 85k allocated for all temporary workers, H1-B applications are selected by a visa lottery system. Those hoping to get a green card literally rely on chance, and this only applies to first-time H1-B applicants. The fact that the government actually calls it a “lottery system” further warrants the label, “Kafkaesque,” and not in a good way.
Since so many applications come from India, in practice they are disproportionately affected. Mexican, Filipino, and Chinese immigrants are also particularly affected by the outdated and illogical backlog system. How “disproportionate” are we talking?
Indians are forced to wait up to 100 years
The waiting line for Indians to get green cards takes decades, even up to 100 years, though applications from the majority of the world could take just a few years. There is no reason the system has to remain like this. If applications from many countries are always so low, why not adjust the policy so higher applicant countries have enough spots in line every year proportionate to the need?
There are many small, uncontroversial changes that could be made overnight to make life more livable for immigrants stuck in the Kafkaesque backlog, but the brutal truth is that there’s no political will to do so.
Meanwhile, families continue to live in uncertainty about their status. It makes it hard to know if they should buy a home. Children tied to a parent’s H1-B face unnecessary barriers to getting driver’s licenses or working. If they age out at age 21 and are no longer considered eligible to be a dependent on their parent’s visa, it could be up to the child to work out their status.
I asked an immigration lawyer, Angela Ferguson, about what people can do in this situation. Do they have to apply for their own visa?
“Yeah . . . but how do they do that?” she asked rhetorically, implying that it’s not so straight-forward. Some people get married to a US citizen to remain in the country, she commented.
I wondered, “But what if they don’t find someone they want to marry by 21?” She said that unfortunately some simply don’t.
Families also find it difficult to visit home in India, even for the death of a loved one, because if they’ve had an H1-B for over 3 years (and received renewal) then every time they leave the US they need to get a new visa stamped in their passport to return. The bureaucracy of how that is administered is so unpredictable people don’t know if they can really take the risk of leaving.
If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Immigration law in the US is so convoluted there’s no way a non-expert can make sense of it. At the panel discussion after the world premiere of ALIEN, immigration lawyer Rekha Sharma-Crawford fielded several audience questions, but explaining these matters in a concise way was difficult without using the analogy of “being stuck in the waiting line.” This is a reminder of why it’s so important to recommend your immigrant friends to see a lawyer. Laypeople can’t make heads or tails of this system.
But you don’t have to be an expert to understand that the backlog controls people’s lives. Dr. Lopa Mathur, a psychologist featured in the documentary, says:
“Immigration is the first thing I think in the morning, and the last thing I think before I go to bed in the night.”
This is a deeply flawed system, but is it racist? Yes. Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says:
“A Western European person will get their green card in maybe like two years. And an Indian could wait decades, multiple decades.”
Racism, Orientalism, and Policy are Connected
Much of the history of US immigration policy is a history of racism. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese immigrants. Then the 1917 Immigration Act set restrictions on immigration from South Asia and the Middle East. The 1924 Immigration Act established quotas on the number of immigrants allowed from each country, giving preference to Europeans. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act denied some legal immigrants access to Medicaid and Food Stamps. And have you ever heard of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which makes it easier to detain and deport noncitizens?
Clinton era decisions laid the groundwork for today’s deportation machine. Obama’s Administration later set the record on deportations. Trump threatened to deport “millions” of immigrants over Twitter, previously having referred to Mexicans as “bad hombres.”
Watching ALIEN brought up difficult feelings for me. I actually grew up in Johnson County, the same county where Srinivas was killed 2017. In fact, the year prior in this majority white county, I was falsely reported to the FBI because a suspicious parishioner at church thought I looked like a “terrorist” from the Middle East. When Adam Purinton shot Srinivas, he also thought the Indian man was Middle Eastern.
The pattern is reminiscent of what Edward Said called, “Orientalism,” a persisting postcolonial attitude common in the West which perceives the East — and by extension, everybody from South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, and Africa — as undeveloped, backwards, and less-than. The West is seen as more rational and superior. “The East” is imagined to have an alluring mystique, though it is also seen as a potential threat to Western society.
Orientalism is still very real, as Indians and South Asians face a quiet form of racism embedded in this country’s immigration laws. It’s a polite and casual racism which views us as nice people who will fix your computer; meanwhile media depictions constantly desexualize and belittle Indian men, portraying them as socially inept, while hypersexualizing and demeaning Indian women, portraying them as “exotic.”
This quiet racism tills fertile ground which can produce something more sinister. Once Henry Kissinger advised Nixon to continue endorsing Yahya Khan of West Pakistan, even as his soldiers committed a systematic genocidal rape of Bengalis. Nixon said the Indians (Bengalis) needed a “mass famine” and sneered at the people who supported “a bunch of brown goddamn Muslims.”
The West has still yet to acknowledge that Winston Churchill knowingly diverted food from starving Indians, resulting in the death of 3,000,000 Bengalis during the Bengal famine. For perspective, 1,000,000 people died in the Irish famine, but while many know of the Irish famine, few in the West know about the Bengal famine or Churchill’s policy failure.
This racist Orientalist attitude embedded in history is called colonialism, though today it is postcolonialism. At a conference, Indian historian Vijay Prashard said:
“You [the West] condescended to us 400 years ago . . . You condescended to us 100 years ago. You’re condescending to us today . . . For you colonialism is a permanent condition.”
As part of the “permanent condition of colonialism,” Western media tends to report only on what is wrong with India, like the caste system, violence against women, or flooding in Bangladesh. India in Details calls out this bias by turning the mirror on the West, citing a poll where 63% of English women respondents said they experienced sexual harassment at bars in the UK. And is America so much more advanced than a caste system, considering 37.9 million Americans are stuck in poverty?
The truth is that as a nation India contributes development aid worth over $30 billion dollars to 65 countries in the form of lines of credit. And in just 50 years after gaining independence and surviving genocide, Bangladesh incredibly went from a “developing country” to a “middle income country.” Bangladesh is not the “third world,” and India is practically a superpower. And as the second-largest immigrant group in the US, Indian Americans are only just beginning to exert their influence as more of them gain the privilege to vote.
Yet, however misinformed it may be, the quiet racism against Indians and South Asians endures. When this quiet racism mixes with anti-immigrant rhetoric, it can become a loud and murderous racism which kills people like Srinivas. This quiet racism still endures in media and in immigration policy, in that “polite” apathy which refuses to update the backlog system while threatening deportation over paperwork discrepancies, like in the case of Syed Jamal.
But if you still think immigration issues have nothing to do with racism, I’ll ask you, when was the last time you saw a white family get separated because ICE deported their mother or father? I’ve accompanied many families victimized by ICE. They’ve all been brown or Black people. The deportation machine is a form of control over brown and Black lives.
The visa system clearly gives preference to Europeans and most other countries except for China, Mexico, the Philippines, and India, making workers from those countries more susceptible to labor exploitation. Remember that this is not new. There is a history of US immigration law making the system harder for South Asians, Chinese, and others, while favoring Europeans.
Perhaps this quiet racism endures because of our own complacency because we do not name it out loud.
It is an enduring racism, unnamed. We ignore it, overlook it. We say it’s not as bad as other racisms or we suggest the Bengali genocide was not as bad as the Holocaust, so why look back when it was just a few million deaths? Even today when an Indian man is killed at a bar, we say it was an isolated incident and deny it had anything to do with racism.
Why do we look for so many excuses? Because the conversation on racism makes us really uncomfortable. Calling it “immigration issues” is a euphemism.
As I reflected on these matters with Sunayana Dumala, the wife of Srinivas, we both agreed on this point: our own Indian people do not speak up for themselves enough, and that needs to change. So whether you are an immigrant or not, I now offer you a challenge and a call to action:
How do we stop accepting a status quo where people wait 100 years to be treated like equals in this society?
This article was inspired by a conversation with Sunayana Dumala, who went on to found Forever Welcome. Screenings of the documentary ALIEN are a way of finally speaking up.
Come be part of the solution. Educate yourself on the history of Orientalism and postcolonialism. Take action. Support the local and national groups working for immigration reform, like Immigration Voice. Hold your politicians accountable for implementing equitable immigration policies.
Structural racism loses its quiet hold over our lives when we name it and thus begin to transform it.
P.S.
The recent success of R.R.R. at the Oscars and the Global Globes was a rare and belated acknowledgement from the Western cultural elite that India has great stories. Hollywood is still largely unaware of the 100 year history of Indian cinema, not to mention 1000s of years of Indian story-telling. The stories we tell and the stories we see can be a good way of changing our perspective of others and ourselves. Check out “The Romantics” on Netflix to learn new perspectives from the history of Indian cinema.
