Nobody likes going through immigration. For one, you’ve already been herded around by your airline. Being given a once-over by immigration officers will not make you feel less cattle-like. Then there are the intrusive questions, or at best the easy all-right-go-in-this-once superiority one otherwise

associates with bouncers at the better sort of nightclub. And for privileged Indians, who tend to ready for battle the moment we sight a bit of bureaucracy, the experience is

always slightly more confrontational than it need be.

But that isn’t enough to explain the massive reaction, especially among Indians living abroad, to Shah Rukh Khan’s 66-minute wait, in a presumably fairly comfortable lounge, at the request of Newark airport’s immigration officers this weekend.

Teachable moments are a terrible invention, in which we take fallible individuals, a partially-remembered confrontation, and twist them to represent Issues We Should Really Talk About. There have been a few recently, but this one marries the American-institutional-racism-even-hits-VIPs narrative of the Henry Louis Gates arrest with the secular-Indian-Muslims-aren’t-allowed-to-transcend-religion subtext surrounding the story about Emraan Hashmi and his apartment-hunting troubles. But putting the Newark incident into easy pigeonholes would miss something deeper about what is actually being revealed here, about what the experience at immigration means to most people arriving in the US: a sudden sense of powerlessness, of protections being stripped away.

Is that emotional reaction in any way reasonable? After all, the United States, for all the reflexive criticism levelled at its society, prioritises individual rights conceptually — and actually engages in the sometimes-agonising process of making sure those ideals don’t conflict too much with practice. Profiling of the sort that Khan alleges, based on ethnic and religious identity, would violate much that’s foundational about the US. And racial profiling — particularly a well-documented tendency historically to pull over African-American motorists driving cars that look too good for them to drive — is, indeed, considered unconstitutional, and only defended now by the most extreme crypto-racists out there. That needed a long discussion during the ’80s and ’90s, though: the argument that stopping and checking African- and Hispanic-Americans disproportionately often was justified because “they committed a disproportionate amount of crime” needed to be demolished both statistically and on an ideological level. It’s now settled that racial information can be used in an investigation or for an arrest — but if you’re looking for a specific offender of the same race. You can’t factor in generalisations about racial or other origins.

... contd.