In the first instance, let me let you that I am not from any of the Muslim countries you so selectively hate, whose citizens’ entry into America you had tried to ban as one of your first Islamophobic/ xenophobic executive orders after you became president. I am also not from Mexico, whereby you have declared umpteen times during your election campaign that you will make a long and tall wall, “really great, beautiful and gorgeous”, paid by the Mexicans, to stop them entering into your country. To the best of my knowledge, people across the border in Mexico, nor its government, are in no mood to make any such sort of payment for your imaginary wall, which, observers believe, is a Typical Trumpeted Trump Card, destined to never see the light of the day.
Your campaign and public conduct have been singularly lacking taste and imagination. You seem to wallow in what political scientists say the post-truth of mass phobia, shifting all the depressions and anxieties of your own botched up economy, vast economic deprivations, huge disparity in income and wealth, massive adult and teenage illiteracy due to the exorbitant cost of higher education, denial of health care to the middle classes and poor, especially the older citizens, the homeless on the streets, especially Afro-Americans, into the politics of xenophobia. If the blacks are poor, it is because racism is rampant in America, isn’t it? If the white working class is feeling deprived and left out of the economy, marginalized by the rich and powerful, surely, neither the blacks nor the Latinos are responsible; surely, not the Muslims?
If American capitalism, post-recession, has proved to be a failing, faltering economic model in the era of globalization and liberalization, with the downward filter theory a pipe dream for all to see, why blame the poor, the homeless and the jobless, who have no formal stakes in the economy? Surely, they can’t even enter the lounge of the many Trump towers all over the big cities of America in what is the real estate boom of a handful of white rich Americans, including Donald Trump. I hear that there is a scramble by the dirty rich in India too, for upwardly mobile space in a luxurious Trump Tower, in Gurgaon, the industrial and semicapitalist hub near the capital of India. That sounds addictive, isn’t it? I hope your engineers have taken care of the water problem, the sanitation issues, law and order and traffic bottlenecks?
So, tell me then, why are you blocking Indians and others from entering and working in America, for long or short stints, by creating all kinds of black holes in the H1B visa? Is it part of your another cooked up fantasy of ‘Make America Great Again’? As of now, watching the 60 minutes of Stormy Daniels on CNN, all it seems is that the tweeterati is deriving a lot of perverse and vicarious pleasure from another campaign right now in the pubs and bars across America, complete with dancing shoes an inuendoes: “Make America Horny Again’. That’s sounds good.
Isn’t America a country of immigrants, great or otherwise, in future or in past? Even the whites arrived from England and Ireland, etc. Even the blacks came in millions chained in slave ships, most of the dead on the hard, hungry, brutal journey from Africa, their dead bodies thrown to the sharks into the swirling waters.
Surely, no American can claim that they are the original, indigenous people, in the short history of the American dream. And what did you all do to the indigenous, the red Indian, of the great civilizations of nature-worshippers who inhabited the vast landscape of the north and south American continent? You eliminated them in one genocide after another, sold them as slaves, destroyed their culture and civilization, and, finally, dumped them as second class, invisible, non-citizens in the ‘reservations’, outside the gaze of ‘Great America’, often trapped in alcohol and the casinos you gave them, uneducated, unemployed, underground. Now, don’t tell me that they are worse than the immigrants. Are they?
While denying H1B visa, or banning citizens from other countries, or delaying the work permit, or green card, or blocking refugees to enter your borders and inhabit the vast and empty land spaces across the vast and empty hinterland, you seem to forget that America is nothing other than the magnificent narrative and synthesis of the immigrants. Even Barack Obama’s ancestors came from Africa. The best colleges, think-tanks, corporates, universities, professional institutions, success stories — they are all the stories of a synthesis of white with many colours: coloured, brown, yellow, black, you name it. Indians, Latinos, Mexicans, Chinese, Pakistanis, Middle-easterners, Central Asians and Africans, Asians, even South and North Koreans, they have all made this dream a reality for America.
And, if globalization is the only mantra of post-truth capitalism, then why this sudden obsession with ghettoisation? If you can’t create jobs for your own jobless, why blame outsiders? If your economy is outsourced, if your manufacturing sector is located outside, including in Mexico on goddam low wages, why the hell should you blame ‘others’ for your own exploitative brand of capitalism? If your many wars have doomed your economy, and created mass guilt, why stop professionals to enter and work in your country when you know that your specialized industries need them so much more?
Under the new rules, reportedly, US firms will perhaps electronically register for visas that are subject to an annual cap of 85,000-65,000 for foreigners coming in from abroad and 20,000 for foreigners with advanced degrees from US colleges and universities. Almost 70 percent of H-1B professionals arrive from India, including those working for US companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook. There is speculation that the Trump regime might withdraw an Obama-era rule that allows work-permits to spouses of H-1B visa-holders who are seeking permanent residency, otherwise known as the green card. This was in line with the Trump campaign: Buy American, Hire American.
There is also speculation that high priority will be given to only those with high salaries, basically to prevent US employers from hiring foreigners for low-paying jobs. In other words, the Mexican wall might not come up really, but other walls will.
That is why, as a young Indian professional, who loves her own country, I have only one thing to tell you, Mr President, Knowledge has no barriers, it can’t be shackled by geographical barriers, it can’t be holed up with electronic or concrete walls. There will always be a Rabindranath Tagore who will go across to Princeton to be warmly welcomed by Einstein. There will always be an Orhan Pamuk, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy who will draw huge audiences in the US, along with Amartya Sen, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. There will always be a Beatles and a Ravishankar who will enthrall the American crowds, even as Satyajit Ray is fondly remembered and admired, and bestowed the lifetime achievement award at the Oscars.
Make America Great Again, surely. However, don’t forget, 200 years is too short a history. And the original civilizations still have a memory. As do immigrants and refugees