Ever more undocumented Indians risk everything on illegal routes to reach US

From the article:

Indians have come to make up the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2021 estimates, which put the number of such Indians at 725,000. India is the only country in the top five outside Latin America, and since 2011, the number of undocumented Indians in the United States has grown by 70 percent, the fastest growth of all nationalities. Figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that the number of undocumented Indian immigrants increased the fastest between 2020 and 2023.

The immigrants are often from middle-class families. They frequently sell their land to pay for the journey — which families say can run $40,000 to $100,000 per person — hoping that working in America will triple their wages, produce a secure future for their children and yield a higher value in the marriage market for their sons.

These migrants are “not the desperately poor” and often come from the most prosperous states in India, said Devesh Kapur, a South Asian studies professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on the Indian diaspora. But faced with a shortage of attractive jobs and a struggling agricultural sector, they find that the wealth they have in India is not enough to transform their lives, and this creates “a culture of migration,” he said.

The migrants pass along a chain of countries chosen because of easy visa requirements, according to interviews with more than a dozen families and their agents in three states in western India. In each place, agents provide the migrants with their next plane ticket as they move closer and closer to Latin America or Canada. From there, depending on how much they pay, they walk or are transported to the U.S. border. If asked questions, they are told to say they don’t feel safe in India.

The trek — along what’s called the “donkey route,” after the Punjabi idiom “dunki,” which refers to hopping — can involve up to a dozen countries and take over a year.

“The danger of the route is not worth it,” said L.K. Yadav, a senior police official in Punjab who set up a team to investigate donkey cases. The country’s youth, he said, have been “misguided with distorted facts” about the journey.

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These days, speed is of the essence. Former president Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric about immigration and promises to crack down on it have been noticed by some Indians. “People are now saying to get out quickly, before Trump comes back,” said the Punjabi agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss illegal activities.

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Jasanpreet Singh, 18, from Haryana, said he missed his 12th-grade exams last year while trying to get to the United States. He tried three times, using routes that, in part, passed through Uzbekistan, Thailand and Laos. On his third attempt, he said, he was caught in the Dubai airport with a fake visa for Serbia, tortured and jailed for a month.

Back in Haryana, he said that almost every home in his village has sent people abroad.

“If the government thought about our children’s future, about their salaries, then why would a child think about going outside?” said his father, Surinder Singh, who explained that he had sold all his family’s land and jewelry to pay for his son’s journey. “The biggest blame is on the government.”

Now, Surinder said, his family is looking to get its money back from the immigration agent. “Then we can try to send him again,” Surinder said of his son. “We aren’t going to keep him here.”