As India develops as a hyper-growth Asian tiger, with Bangladesh next door, immigration is inevitable. Until Bangladesh becomes a medium growth country (Goldman Sachs seems to believe it’s possible), we will be as a ‘Mexico’ to India’s ‘United States’. Bangladeshis, hungry for work, with families to feed, will cross the borders.

Immigrants are ubiquitous in the daily lives of modern cities. In a megapolis like New York, they are the ones who drive taxis, sell newspapers and coffee, clean restaurant tables and work in kitchens. They are intimately present in the physical space, but absent from consciousness. Only when they are detained do they become hyper-visible as ‘sleeper cells.’

The desire to identify ‘traitors’ within borders has a long lineage. In America (‘the immigrant nation’), the last century saw detention of Italian immigrants after the anarchist bomb attack in 1919, jailing of German-Americans during WWI, internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, execution of suspected Soviet spies Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, Joseph McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’, the scapegoating of California Mexicans, and the rise of the border vigilante militia Minutemen. W.E.B. Dubois’s question to African Americans, “How does it feel to be a problem?” is now redirected and made freshly relevant for a new population.

When the Hyderabad blasts happened, we heard intel was tracking phone calls to Bangladesh. What happened to that trail? Did the investigation go somewhere? If not, what about the public perception created about ‘dangerous’ Bangladeshis? A few years ago, there was another Bangla ‘terror cell’, splashed across Indian media. Again the story died out. The similarities to the US media are eerie.

... contd.