Deportation of illegal immigrants to India | Waiting for life to happen

Sitting on a beige velvet sofa in his two-storey house at Lopoke village in Punjab’s Amritsar district, Vishal Sharma, 38, turns the pages of his passport, tracing the stamps of various countries with his fingers. He looks longingly out of his window at a replica of the Statue of Liberty in his village bordering Pakistan. In 2023, Sharma and 275 others, who had left home to live the ‘American dream’, were deported to India after they had tried to enter the U.S. illegally. Now, he lives in the village of his birth, practising farming with his elder brother.

In a statement made in Parliament on February 6 this year, S. Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister, said since 2009, the U.S. has sent back 15,756 illegal Indian immigrants. This was after a U.S. military plane landed at the Amritsar airport with 104 illegal immigrants in handcuffs.

With a sullen face, Sharma says ever since his return, he has been trying to make peace with the fact that he will no longer be able to work in the U.S. “There are no legal restrictions on my movement, but having seen so many people being deported in the past few weeks, there is no way I’m going to ever make it through,” he says. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there were 2.2 lakh Indians living as illegal immigrants in the country in 2022.

The despondence in Sharma’s voice is partly from seeing three flights carrying deportees from the U.S. land in India in the past three weeks and partly from knowing that other than the illegal ‘donkey route’, it is unlikely that he can reach the U.S. legally. “I have to accept that this is how my life will be: farming, a shared income with siblings, and a life limited to this village,” he says.

Like many around him, Sharma dreamt of a life in a developed country in the West since his early adulthood days. “Initially, it was the fascination of a foreign land, then it was earning in dollars, and now it is about respect and the promise of a better future for me and my family,” he says. Parents of youth in Punjab urge them on, fearful that the State’s drug problem will reach them.

Hope and reality

Pointing towards the houses in his neighbourhood — some sprawling mansions, others with thatched roofs — he says everyone around him only aims to move abroad, sometimes through scholarships to study and sometimes on work visas. Then there is the ‘donkey route’ that involves unregistered agents taking people through different countries, landing up at the U.S. border, where they cross over on land.

Being a high school graduate from a government school with a low score in the International English Language Testing System that gauges the English proficiency of non-native speakers, Sharma was sure that his pathway to the U.S. was not through higher education. “Some of my friends had started working there as drivers and managers at grocery stores. I too wanted a job like them and earn as much,” he says.

He began to check with his friends’ agents about the possibility of moving and the associated costs. Every friend had a different agent, and each agent had a different route to take him to the U.S. border. “Some suggested going through the Panama forest, some through layovers in multiple countries on tourist visas, some even promised the direct route via a work visa,” he says. In 2023, he sold a killa (about an acre) of the land he had inherited to fund his dreams.

The agent first flew him to Thailand on a tourist visa. Then over the next few months, he sent him to Vietnam multiple times, again on a tourist visa, promising that once he was there a work visa for the U.S. would be granted. “I spent weeks in Vietnam, Thailand, and Egypt, waiting for a way to reach the U.S., but each time I would have to come back to India because the agent could not get the visa and my tourist visa would expire in those countries,” he says.

After multiple such trips, a Dubai-based agent assured Sharma that he could avoid the ‘donkey route’ by taking a private flight from Dubai to Nicaragua, a central American country. “The private flight left on December 22 (in 2023) from a small, not very popular airport in Dubai. It was stopped in France, where it had a layover. From there the flight was turned back to Mumbai,” he says.

When the flight landed in Mumbai, Sharma realised that the ₹10 lakh he had spent on staying in multiple countries waiting for a visa to the U.S. was for nothing. “The agent stopped taking my calls. The flight back had Punjabis, Gujaratis, and Haryanvis. The police had started investigating it as a human trafficking case on the order of the Indian government,” he says.

Sharma gestures towards a cowshed. He helps his brother with farming and takes care of buffaloes. “We spent over ₹2 lakh on the buffaloes and one has broken his leg. Farming has diminishing returns,” laments Sharma. He adds that no father wants to get his daughter married to a man who lives in a village with no prospects of going abroad. “With my education, I can only get a job that will pay ₹10,000 to ₹12,000 (a month) here. Who will marry me?”

Caught for re-entry

This feeling of being stuck in rural, agricultural Punjab since being deported is common across homes. Gursharan Singh, 22, a resident of Mehoka village in Amritsar district, was deported in 2023. His brother has been working in Spain as a farm labourer for eight months now. “In Spain, he makes ₹90,000 a month. Here, we sowed gobi (cauliflower) that sold at ₹50 per kg. Now, it is being sold at ₹1.50 per kg (in the wholesale market), yet we are supposed to continue staying here, content with our earnings,” he says, resentfully.

Gursharan’s mother Rajwant Kaur, 55, says, “Dollar kamana bhi bhagya mein hona chahiye, warna kyu itne sare dunky se chale gaye aur yeh pakda gaya (To earn in dollars is a matter of destiny; why else would so many successfully enter the country by taking the donkey route and he be caught).” Gursharan was caught on the U.S.-Mexico border.

After being deported, many have settled back into life as they knew it. Some reattempt entry, sometimes ending up in deportation camps. A month ago, Balwinder Singh, 55, a resident of Manawala village in Amritsar district, received a call from an unknown number.

All he could make out from the man who spoke with a foreign accent was that his younger brother, Sukhdev Singh, 35, was in a detention camp in Texas, U.S. “Sirf naam aur location pata laga; baki kaisa hai, aur ab kya hoga kuch pata nehi laga (I only got to know the name and location; I was not told how he is and what will happen now),” says Balwinder.

Sukhdev, who had been working as a carpenter in Dubai for close to a decade earning ₹50,000 a month, had been attempting to go to the U.S. for a few years. His family did not know of his aspirations or plans.

“One day, he told me that he wanted to sell his portion of the land and buy a car,” says Balwinder. “Mujhe laga Dubai mein hi business karega, toh maine ek killa zameen bech diya (I thought he would start a business in Dubai, so I sold some part of the land),” he says, adding that the deal fetched him ₹30 lakh.

Sukhdev, his wife Rajneet Kaur, 32, teenage son, and infant daughter then boarded the Nicaragua-bound flight from Dubai, which was turned back to Mumbai in 2023. He was grief-stricken, but determined to return again through the illegal route. Kaur did not know this. “He never shared his plans with me. He confides in his older brother, so when he left in August 2024, I did not know he was going to ‘Amricca’,” she says.

She is worried about the situation her husband is in, but sitting in her asbestos-roofed home amid green fields in Manawala, Kaur is unable to understand the ground realities of a detention camp in Texas. “Ab itna kharcha ho gaya hai toh kuch kamakar hi wapis aye (Now that so much has been spent, he might as well earn some money and come back,” she says.

Balwinder hopes Sukhdev can stay on in the U.S. “Here I can hire a farm labourer for ₹300 a day and get work done. He does not have to lend me a hand. Anyway, earnings are going down with every harvest season. How much will he even make here?”

High prices to pay

Meanwhile, 10 km from Sukhdev’s house, Sarwan Singh, 26, working on a rented field in Chogawan village, says the youth in India, especially in Punjab, have no option but to go abroad.

“My brother, a 12th pass, tried finding a job,” he says, referring to his sibling’s highest education as being a school graduate. “He got a job in a cloth mill where he was offered ₹8,000 a month. He then tried starting a dairy farming business, but it did not take off. Now with two unmarried sisters and ageing parents, what other option do we have?” Sarwan says.

His brother, Nishant Singh, 24, like many in his village, joined a ‘chain’ of people who helped each other migrate to the U.S. and Canada, all illegally. “One friend had been working as an Uber driver there and another in a shopping mall. They told us that they were making ₹4 lakh-₹5 lakh a month,” Sarwan says, standing in his field, where a Canadian flag is painted on a cement water tank.

As he pauses to utter his next sentence, a four-wheeler zips past, blaring Cheema Y and Gur Sidhu’s song ‘Trump’, which went viral on social media. Smirking at the lines “Jattan deputton nu rok sake na Trump (Trump can’t stop the sons of the Jats)”, Sarwan says he hopes that his brother is not sent back home.

Teary-eyed, he looks at his harvest and says sometimes there is flooding, sometimes the government does not buy the grain at a rate that will secure farmers a profit. Then there is the ever-increasing rent of land, making it difficult for any small-scale farmer like him to save any money, he says.

“The rent for an acre is ₹70,000. In addition, there are other fixed costs. I hardly get anything to take back home. If my brother comes back after spending over ₹40 lakh, how will we even pay back the loan?” he says.

He knows his brother could well be on the next flight out of the U.S. Each time the phone rings and he sees an unknown number, he is anxious.

alisha.d@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew