The scourge of illegal migration
UNKNOWN to nearly 300 Indian nationals on the ill-starred ‘human trafficking’ flight to Nicaragua, their attempt to sneak into prosperous North America was doomed a month before they boarded the Romanian charter aircraft.
Even as Indians were boarding the flight to Nicaragua, the Central government was locking the stable door after the horses had bolted.
On November 21, the US State Department invoked a provision in America’s Immigration and Nationality Act to target, foil and punish those who were routinely ferrying foreigners into Nicaragua on charter flights. The traffickers’ intention was to eventually push these foreigners into the US through dangerous overland and waterway routes northwards, the department alleged. The announcement, scarcely noticed in India at that time, made four key points. One, Nicaragua has emerged as a new illegal transit point for prospective migrants to the US through unlawful means and the Joe Biden administration is preparing to smash this racket. Two, criminal gangs are charging ‘extortion-level prices’ from migrants and exposing them to grave risks. Three, the US will hunt down such illegal immigrants even if they enter the country and repatriate them back home at a great cost, thereby dashing their hopes of realising the ‘American dream’. Four, the US administration is preparing to crack down on ‘owners, executives and senior officials of companies providing charter flights into Nicaragua’.
Section 212 (a)(3)(C) of the US Act “allows the Secretary of State to exclude any applicant whose entry or proposed activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the US”. The November announcement said it was this provision that Secretary of State Antony Blinken planned to use against the Nicaraguan kingpins of the immigration racket and their collaborators and facilitators around the globe. On the eve of the UAE-Nicaragua charter flight, the State Department reiterated that those operating such flights to Nicaragua, carrying migrants whose final destination was the US-Mexico border, would not be spared under the cited law. Unfortunately, this second warning by Washington was also missed in India.
It is assumed that a French government unit, which fights organised crime, was tipped off by its US counterparts once the latter gathered intelligence that a Legend Airlines flight with several hundred suspect Indians would land at the Vatry airport for refuelling. It is reassuring that transatlantic sharing of intelligence makes the world a safer place. But it also raises a disturbing question: Why was such intelligence not shared with New Delhi? After all, almost the entire planeload which was detained in France for four days at an airport ill-equipped for such emergencies comprised Indian nationals.
A reliable source in Washington said US officials did not want to disrupt the flight before it was airborne. They wanted to effectively expose the migration racket by making it hit the headlines so that action would be taken on a global scale. While the plane, which even had unaccompanied minor passengers, was under siege at Vatry, it made news throughout the world. Christmas celebrations were disrupted in northeastern France and official circles in Paris because of the unusual incident, which made it big on television in Europe.
Criminal gangs preying on wannabe migrants to the West will not attempt a similar flight, at least for some time. As a preventive strategy, this was more effective than stopping the flight in question before it took off from the Emirate of Fujairah. A few weeks before the State Department invoked the punitive immigration law, Haiti suspended all flights from its capital to Nicaragua. The US had said that Haiti was a source — like India, it is now in the open — of illegal migration to North America via Managua, the capital of Nicaragua.
It is an irony that even as the Indians, who had begged and borrowed to pay touts lakhs of rupees to smuggle them into rich countries, were boarding the flight to Nicaragua, the Indian government was proverbially locking the stable door after the horses had bolted. On December 21, with a lot of fanfare, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) launched a programme with a habitually catchy acronym meant to capture the popular imagination. PRAYAS, which expands as Promoting Regular and Assisted Migration for Youth and Skilled Professionals, “envisages development of a roadmap for improved coordination between Central and state governments to encourage sharing of best practices between states and enhanced engagement with the MEA on matters related to the international migration cycle.” The police now say that at least two planeloads of Indians were similarly taken undetected recently on charter flights to Nicaragua. In their calculated effort to dramatise the latest escapade of several hundred illegal Indian migrants to the West, crime-fighting agencies of the US and French governments kept not only India but also the United Nations in the dark about the extensive criminal network operating mainly from Punjab and Gujarat all the way to the Western hemisphere via Europe. PRAYAS is a joint project between the UN body, the International Organisation for Migration and the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi’s oldest government-managed international relations think tank.
In yet another irony, the MEA warned a week before the Legend Airlines charter flight that “there has been a huge rise in the number of overseas job seekers being cheated by unregistered recruitment agents”. Preying on Indians who want to go abroad is happening on a global scale. The MEA warned that “cases are being reported… in several East European countries, some Gulf countries, Central Asia, Israel, Canada, Myanmar and Lao People’s Democratic Republic”.
During every session of Parliament, the government gets a large volume of questions for zero hour on the scourge of illegal migration. A week before the Romanian flight, an MEA minister pleaded helplessness in the Lok Sabha about the complexity of the problem. “Many foreign countries do not provide information on illegal stay in their countries, until when there are orders of deportation,” the minister said. He conceded that “our Missions do not have any reliable data on the number of Indians staying or working illegally in foreign countries”. To say that this is shocking is an understatement. This will not do. The episode at the Vatry airport points to the scale of the problem and the need for comprehensive immigration reforms, failing which more Indians will become victims of migration touts and global criminal gangs.
