Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Trump’s America: Will it hit Indians’ hopes and dreams?

It would be extremely short-sighted for everyone — Indians and the rest of the world — to do so any longer. “The United States is now an occupied country,” Mr Trump told a recent rally in Atlanta. “But on November 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.” Liberation meant his re-election as the 47th President of the United States. That he is a convicted felon is neither here nor there. Nor does his threat to impose punishing import duties on Chinese goods really matter (except, maybe, to the Chinese). But the promise to stage the “largest deportation operation in American history” cannot similarly be ignored at a time when the world is on the move mainly because countries like India do not offer any great opportunities at home.

True, the threat is aimed mainly at Latinos. But statistics show that Indians are emerging as one of the largest groups of migrants to the US. It may not worry them that Mr Trump’s threat reneges on the lofty promise of New York’s Statue of Liberty and betrays the perception of America as a land of immigrants. But they cannot pretend to ignore the practical implications of a policy that was repeated so endlessly during the recent campaign that it became a rallying cry.

Trump loyalists waved signs that read “Mass deportations now!” and chanted “Send them back” at the Republican convention in Milwaukee earlier this year.

Earlier, in 2015, he pledged to construct a “great wall” along the US-Mexico border to keep out immigrants who he disparaged as “rapists” and drug dealers. In the final weeks of the race, he again turned his wrath against immigrants as well as people who were already there. Perhaps some echo of this reached India with Amit Shah describing Bangladeshi immigrants as “termites”.

Not that he has offered concrete details about his plans, but in public remarks and interviews, the President-elect and his allies, including Stephen Miller, the architect of his harsh immigration agenda and an influential adviser, have sketched out a vision that dovetails with Project 2025, a 900-plus page presidential transition blueprint led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

Some fear that implementation of this strategy may involve the use of American soldiers for immigration enforcement and border security and the application of antediluvian wartime powers.

Mr Trump himself has invoked the 1954 campaign by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dubbed “Operation Wetback”, it involved rounding up and deporting hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent, including US citizens.

Many fear that the pledge to expel “maybe as many as 20 million” people from the US may throw out legal migrants too. The vast majority of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US in 2022 had been in the country for more than a decade. More than two million new arrivals since Joe Biden took office remain in the country. Lakhs of immigrants allowed to temporarily live and work in the US could see their status revoked.

Mr Trump also warns that the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the summary deportation of non-citizens from a country with which the US is at war, could be used “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil”. His plans also include the construction of enormous detention camps “greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date”.

Beyond deportation, Mr Trump has vowed to “terminate” every one of President Biden’s “open-borders” policies. Instead, asylum-seekers would be required to remain in Mexico while their claims are processed, under the emergency health authority, Title 42, that will be invoked to allow US officials to turn away asylum seekers at the border.

This platform calls for reinstating a version of his controversial ban on travel from several primarily Muslim countries, which Mr Biden denounced as “a stain on our national conscience” and ended on his first day in office.

Most scholars think the Trump camp’s legal theories to support ending birthright citizenship for the American-born children of undocumented immigrants is unconstitutional. Mr Trump also says that he would impose ideological screenings to keep “Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America”. The visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests could be rescinded.

US Presidents do enjoy wide latitude to act on immigration. An emboldened Mr Trump, with a supportive or deadlocked US Congress, could therefore dramatically reshape the immigration system, especially by restricting legal pathways. This is a theme that might be developed as Trump spokespersons blame the Biden-Harris administration for creating an “unprecedented immigration, humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border”.

“President Trump will restore his effective immigration policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers in American history,” according to a prominent spokesperson.

Returning to the Channel drowning, Mr Trump’s proclaimed intentions gain some sort of legitimacy from the pressure that is building up across the Atlantic to force Britain’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to announce and enforce a strict migrant policy. An Oxford University study reckons that Britain might have as many as 745,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to a city the size of Leeds. There are fears that all social services will collapse under the weight of an unchecked influx of unauthorised foreigners like the hapless Indian.

But whether Mr Trump will go through with his drastic plans is another matter. He is an impetuous man whose bark may at times be worse than his bite.

He is deeply conscious of his global image and affects to admire Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If he truly does so, he cannot be oblivious of the damage that such restricted migration into the United States can have on Mr Modi’s standing among Indians who prize a US “Green Card” as a bride’s most attractive dowry.