Bangladeshi Immigration to India: The Question of Normative Responsibility (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Democracy, Borders, and Immigration

Abstract

Most normative theorists of immigration seem to assume that all international migration involves movement from poor countries in Asia and Africa to rich countries in North America and Europe. The dominant images for most theorists of immigration are likely Latino immigrants crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States or Africans in precarious rafts traversing the Mediterranean to Europe. The implicit assumption that migration flows exclusively from poor to rich countries animates claims that a general right to immigrate or open borders will serve as an effective means of global wealth distribution (Oberman 2017; Carens 1987). However, the assumption that migrants exclusively move from poor to rich countries overlooks the fact that large numbers of migrants actually move from poor countries to other countries that are only slightly less poor. In fact, according to the 2020 World Migration Report, 95 million international migrants ended up settling in middle or low income countries. And with 82 million immigrants, Asia, not Europe or North America, remains the continent that receives the largest number of international migrants (World Migration Report 2020, 24-26).

Irregular immigration from Bangladesh into India provides an important counter to the dominant images animating most normative theorizing on immigration. While firm numbers are impossible to attain, estimates suggest that by 2016 15 million Bangladeshis were living and working in India without legal permission (Tripathi 2016). The World Migration Report subsequently reported that roughly 3 million Bangladeshis irregularly immigrated to India in 2019 (WMR 72). Most Bangladeshi irregular immigration is motivated by the desire for improved economic prospects in India, such as work in brick kilns in border areas or in menial domestic or manual labor in large Indian cities like Kolkatta and New Delhi (Chowdhury 2018, 38). The Indian government has reacted to this influx by building border fencing and trying to repatriate Bangladeshi migrants through its evocatively titled policy, “Operation Pushback” (Shamshad 2017, 16). While these policies have provoked criticism as inhumane and Islamophobic, particularly when initiated by Hindu Nationalist politicians, more difficult to dismiss are concerns by small national minorities, such as the Assamese, who fear being outnumbered in their linguistically defined state. And although India is somewhat wealthier than Bangladesh, it remains far poorer than the European and North American countries that normative theorists believe bear the greatest obligation to alleviate the global poverty that provokes so much international migration.

In this paper, I apply David Miller’s theory of remedial responsibility to the issue of irregular Bangladeshi immigration to India. Whereas India presently finds itself empirically responsible for addressing the needs of irregular Bangladeshi migrants, I argue that Miller’s theory would require assigning greater normative responsibility to the United Kingdom, the former colonial overseer of both countries. British responsibility stems both from its past actions as colonizer and its present economic capacity to receive Bangladeshi immigrants. Although British imperialism in South Asia generated many injustices, I focus on three imperial elements that were crucial in creating the economic, social, and cultural conditions that motivate poor Bangladeshis to migrate to India.

First, British colonizers, starting with Warren Hastings in the late 18th century, reified a variety of diverse and syncretic local religious customs into a neat binary religious distinction between Hindus and Muslims, which was then codified into British imperial legal practice. This religious-legal distinction contributed to the partition of British India into majority-Hindu state of India and the majority-Muslim Pakistan, the eastern part of which became Bangladesh in 1971. Second, the border between present-day India and Bangladesh was haphazardly imposed by the British imperial official Sir Cyril Radcliffe, whose ignorance of the local territory as widely known but tolerated due to the British imperial practice of conferring important positions onto confident amateurs rather than narrow technicians. Finally, while the crushing poverty in contemporary Bangladesh has many causes, one contributing factor was British World War II policy of diverting foodstuffs from domestic consumption in northeastern India to British troops combatting the Japanese in Southeast Asia, a policy which generated the infamous Bengali famine of the 1940s.

If my argument is correct, then Britain’s compliance with its normative responsibility to Bangladeshi migrants can be executed not through facile, passive measures like open borders or recognizing a human right to immigrate but rather through a policy of actively seeking poor Bangladeshis who wish to emigrate to Britain in order to improve their economic condition.

Author

• Michael R. James, Bucknell University