Insular, paranoid: on Donald Trump, the U.S., legal migration
President Donald Trump's decision to ban citizens from 12 countries from entering the United States, citing national security concerns, is yet another attempt by his five-month-old administration to tear down legal migration. Mr. Trump's decision in 2017, during his first term, to ban citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries had triggered chaos and protests at America's airports, evoked criticism of the unstated racism and xenophobia, and led to legal challenges. This time, Mr. Trump has focused on mostly West Asia and Africa. Citizens from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen would be banned, while people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will face restrictions. The ban applies only to people outside the U.S. but those with active visas who leave the country could face difficulty during re-entry. Mr. Trump argued that the ban, which came days after the arrest of an Egyptian man for carrying out an attack on a group honouring the Gaza hostages, would help prevent terrorist attacks and keep out those who overstay their visas. Egypt, a close American ally, and Spain, which saw 20,000 of its citizens overstay their visas in 2023, are not on the list, but Chad, whose visa overstay number is as low as 400, is.
Since his swearing-in as the President, in January, for the second time, Mr. Trump has taken a series of measures to crack down on migration. He has suspended the asylum system at the southern border and ended temporary legal residency for Haitians, Venezuelans and Cubans. He has also removed the legal status of thousands of foreign students and instructed U.S. diplomatic missions to pause scheduling new visa interviews as his administration prepares to vet the social media handles of students and scholars. His policies targeting international students have already spread chaos and uncertainty across America's universities. Now, the outright ban on citizens from a group of countries reinforces the erosion of the self-image of the U.S. — 'the shining city on a hill' as Ronald Reagan once called it — as a pluralistic, open society. Mr. Trump's claim that immigrants bring crime into the U.S. is ill-founded. Many of the people seeking entry into the U.S., from countries that had seen American military intervention, such as Haiti and Afghanistan, are fleeing war, persecution and systemic violence. They are not national security threats but victims in search of refuge. By shutting America's doors on them, and immigrants in general, Mr. Trump is not making the U.S. safer. Rather, he is turning a country, which historically welcomed immigration and has benefited from it, into an insular, paranoid, self-doubting republic.
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A subset of them might get involved with some sort of voluntary work for what the community calls Hindu 'advocacy', educating lawmakers, canvassing voter support, and so on. Students and Teachers Should Lead the Change, Not Lobbies and 'Leaders' The second theme pertains to the patterns of response within this last subsection. No doubt, the numbers of people and the number of Hindu voluntary organisations trying to do something have grown in the last two decades. They face severe challenges in terms of resources and know-how, as well as 'know-why', a problem in social-historical self-knowledge, which we explain further below. But the pattern of response here is typically to host a bunch of online talks and then move from one gathering or 'awareness day' to the next. But we rarely see organising oriented towards securing long-term institutional changes in universities. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Right from the 1960s, most changes in academia have happened as a result of universities agreeing to set up tenured faculty positions for specific areas of study demanded by student groups. University administrators take student needs seriously in America, and so do faculty. If students point out a gap in a curriculum or systemic flaws in how a student constituency is being taught about in the relevant area studies or identity studies courses, they may well be invited to join in the conversation to create a course or program. If students make the case in a sustained scholarly manner (usually with help from sympathetic vanguard academic mentors), then the university will find the funds to create a position and fill it. If, say, a university agreed to create a tenure track position in Hinduphobia Studies or Hindu Human Rights, it will imply that every academic year, anywhere from 100 to 300 students (depending on the size of the campus) of all backgrounds, not just Hindus, will be educated, formally, in issues which so far have remained only in easily ignorable online spaces. And if that professor stays on and gets tenured, you are looking at a 30-year project or 30 multiplied by 100-300 students who have been exposed to their ideas over three decades. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of students can get educated on human rights issues faced by Hindus, and not just in a fleeting online or weekend gathering format, but in an in-depth seminar meeting for several hours every week for a whole semester. Learning is built in-depth, and so is a long-term legacy for this body of learning in society at large as students graduate and go to work in humanities professions like teaching, arts, writing, journalism, media, film-making, social work, politics, diplomacy, and so on. This basic reality is something most other communities in US colleges are aware of. For instance, in the last two years of sweeping pro-Palestine activism on campuses, one of the demands universities have acceded to is exactly this – more tenured positions and programmes in Palestine studies. Hindu organisations trying to offer moral and social support to Hindu college students, on the other hand, tend to approach campus Hindu issues in a top-down manner, completely bypassing the educational component of the Hindu student experience. They seem overly obsessed with framing the problem as a 'religious' need issue, ignoring the core academic elephant in the room, and demanding cosmetic 'student life' things like a prayer room or a 'recognition note' or a 'Hindu Chaplain'. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Hindus Should Talk Human Rights, Not Multicultural Platitudes These demands don't pose any challenge to the academic status quo or its main product, which is a false story about Hindus, Hinduism, and India today. Demanding recognition or praise for a religion in campus life outside of the classroom merely skirts around the issue and often backfires too. 'Islamophobia' and 'antisemitism' are understood on US campuses by faculty, students, and administrators as human rights issues, whereas anything 'Hindu' comes across to them as a demand for just one religion to be treated like it's 'special'. That is one reason for the deep inertia on campuses when it comes to Hindu issues (based on personal experience, once again, of three decades in US universities and very specific conversations to this effect). On that note, one wonders, for example, how the Berkeley student officials might have reacted if the demand was made not for a 'Hindu Heritage Month' with a focus on how successful Hindu Americans have been in America (which often defeats the messaging about 'Hinduphobia' later) but simply and directly for an 'Anti-Hindu Racism and Genocide Awareness Month', forcing opponents to really reconsider which side of racism they want to be on. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Demonstrating bias, error, and egregious racism inside the institution's core product itself, its 'knowledge' about us, and demanding our right to speak to it, is the only duty we have if in a university. And on this point, one more nuance needs to be understood. There are many more subjects beyond just 'religion' or 'Hinduism Studies' in which proper, academically guided engagement needs to take place. Community leaders and groups have in the past taken a helicopter view, assuming that all they had to do was to raise donations to buy India or Hinduism Chairs, and the problem vanishes. Unfortunately, this did not win the grace of the Goddess of Learning, and it seems that at least that lesson has been learnt. The Tamas-Rajas Trap The third theme, a key one in understanding our diagnosis here, has to do with why the obvious path towards long-term change hasn't been sighted, let alone pursued with determination by the Hindu community here. Rather than the usual blame games or the usual clichés about 'lack of unity', one may gain from a yogic view. Hindu responses to the deeply entrenched problems of Hinduphobia in the academia, in the media, and in the world at large seem to swing between a state of 'Rajas' and 'Tamas.' In the past ten years or so, the following pattern has played out numerous times. There are long periods of silence, punctuated by very routine, low-key, non-controversial cultural events and gatherings by Hindu or Indian students. At this same time, other initiatives, often bearing the signature worldview and institutional legitimacy and heft of South Asia studies faculty and their allies, progress very quickly. Professors get other professors and activists and lobbyists to come to campuses to speak about Hindutva and caste. Documentaries are screened about Hindu patriarchy and violence (but never about, say, the devastating phenomenon of 'grooming gangs' in the UK). Peer pressure grows enormously on the vast number of silent, usually STEM-focused Indian students, to the point where even their non-controversial activities like celebrating Holi or Diwali suddenly become a political and moral choice they have to make. Usually around this time, a small group of students get emboldened. Their friends, from former students to community leaders, step in to advise them. Suddenly, there is a big-name event advertised, usually featuring a controversial speaker, usually a non-academic, and usually from India. Backlash ensues. After a brief bout of Rajassic assertiveness, the Tamas returns. For months, maybe years, students become overcautious and refrain from speaking up even when legitimacy and timing are on their side. In this Rajas-Tamas brashness and timidity cycle, the 'Satvic' moment rarely gets to stick, unfortunately. Truth: There is a Threat, and There is Fear The fourth and last theme to consider here is that of ignorance and fear. We do not say 'ignorance' in a judgemental manner, but to merely connote a lack of information, understanding, and experience in navigating educational institutions as a minority community and in surviving more generally in a host society where xenophobia and religious racism are clearly rising on both sides of their political divide. Hopefully, the first part of this problem, which is the fear of making institutional demands from universities that Hindu students, parents and community leaders (who are invariably from outside academia, or at least the pertinent fields of study in academia) seem to have, will be usefully mitigated by the facts shared in this essay. Most of the time, when we swing from aggressive posturing to timid self-erasure in our actions, it may well be because we haven't learnt enough about the ecology we inhabit so as to centre ourselves in the balanced middle. A satvic understanding of what Hindu students today can do while in college to their home of four (or more) years so as to make it better for their younger siblings and descendants will be a wonderful quality to cultivate and practice. Unfortunately, there is a deeper problem of fear among Hindus which really needs to be talked about as well. A lot of modern Hindu behaviour in America can be understood in relation to this. Brash, successful, pro-Palestine 'HINO' Hindus (as they are called), as well as more culturally rooted and concerned Hindus worried about Hinduphobia, all have one reality they share. Hindus live in a world that is non-Hindu at best and anti-Hindu at worst. We are all coping with it. 'HINO' Hindus believe they have achieved top-level cosmopolitanism and that there is no such thing as anti-Hindu bigotry or prejudice in the world. What they don't realise is that there is something in the social and political ecology of the world which has turned them, in just two or three generations from their grandparents' time, into whatever deracinated cosmopolitan far-right jihadist-supporting personas they now inhabit. They are, in a way, converts, not to the usual converting religions, but to the extremely superficial and shaky religion of selectively secular progressivism. It gives them an air of certainty and comfort and even superiority. But from the time of the Inquisitions to the present, a coercive system will always demand purity tests. Even someone as American, Californian, and culturally cosmopolitan as former Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, was accused of being a Brahmin supremacist by some activists. But for Hindus in America who still like to think they are spiritually and culturally active and would like to see the same in their otherwise materially successful children going to college, that fear plays out in a different way. They have found a way to cope by downplaying the threats which produce that fear and exaggerating the things which they think can counteract those threats: their education, economic status, model-minority good conduct, faith in liberal democracy, avoiding controversy and so on. They look at other immigrants who are successful and imitate each other, confining Hinduism to safe and tested routines like temples, hurried weekend classes for children, and, of late, a little bit of engagement with politicians, usually to get 'recognition' proclamations passed. With the rise of the internet and social media, they have become more aware of problems and threats but have also fallen into the inertia of false security and complacency in gatherings and numbers. But the fact that they rarely go beyond talking about problems to doing what actually needs to be done (in higher education, in the case of this article) shows they are perhaps paralysed by fear too, sometimes, quite literally. In a recent planning meeting for Hindu parents organising children's weekend classes for the coming year, a suggestion to include college experience 'reality check' orientation sessions for high school students by professors and old students from the program now in college led to some strangely confused, silent responses, with people staring down at the floor and freezing up in tension! No wonder some Hindu American parents lament that their children loved Hinduism and Indian culture when in school but turned viciously anti-Hindu in college. Colleges will teach your children in their Hinduism, South Asian history and politics, or diaspora studies classes that their innocent childhood memories of going to Bala Vikas or Bala Vihar were actually wrong and that these were Hindu nationalist indoctrination camps. That's what is published in peer-reviewed journals and books, and that's what is prescribed, and that's what will be taught (not always, but in most cases). The professors in many cases may not actually know better, and the students who do know better unfortunately have never been taught by parents or elders that they do have a right, indeed a duty, to speak up and assert the truth. And now, as more and more unhappy stories emerge, whether it is of extreme violence like Pahalgam or extreme self-censorship over it by Hindu students and parents, the elephant in the room has to be named. Maybe 'Hinduphobia' is a term that should be re-understood not as bigotry or aversion against Hindus but simply as the Hindu state of perpetual fear of being Hindu. Smash the Hinduphobia – at Home, First! The cause of that fear is not paranoia but the fact that there is a threat, and even those who avoid seeing it perhaps know it deep down in their hearts. To get out of this paralysis, though, is possible. Borrowed clichés from American liberalism or right-wingism won't do it. We must return to our ancient critical tradition of saying Neti, Neti. We have to reject the models of learning we were drilled into by schools and colleges and corporate employers and peer groups which have turned us into mere employable robots and stop trying to force-fit our resplendent cultural traditions and expressions into the fringes and anonymous cubicles of modern society. We must stop asking for small favours from modern institutions and rise to look at our role as the big favour we are about to do for all of them, given how much their 'brotherhood of man' dreams swinging between Left and Right extremes have failed and how we still carry the energy and purpose and protection of our 'motherhood of god' traditions in us. We must learn, however we can, to learn again. We have to become, each, our own cultural and spiritual revolutionary schools. A saffron storm must rise over these overrated racist hold-outs and teach them what it means to learn and to live under our mother earth's reign once again. Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including 'Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence' (Westland, 2015). C Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.
