Of Borders, Bans, and Brown Skin

On January 27, 2017, the US President, Donald Trump, signed an executive order suspending the United States refugee admissions program for 120 days and banning people from seven nations with Muslim-majority populations from entering the country for 90 days. In the few days since, there has been ample confusion regarding the scope of the order, such as, for instance, about the question of whether it applies to legal permanent residents or green card holders of these countries as well. While the administration has insisted it is not a Muslim ban, a statement made by White House adviser and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani suggests that it was possibly intended as such.

The order has been greeted by widespread protests by civil society groups and the American public, who have shown up in large numbers at US airports to provide legal aid and moral support to those detained by customs and immigration officials on the basis of the new policy. Deportations have been halted thanks to a stay order granted by a US federal judge, following a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Some immigration officials, however, have defied the judge’s order in continuing to enforce the ban. 

While backtracking on the issue of the applicability of the order to green card holders, Trump and his administration have been unapologetic in defending it. How things ultimately shake out in the face of legal challenges to the policy is anyone’s guess. But the action itself and events thus far are likely to have far-reaching ramifications, not least for a country like India, with a significant, if numerically small, diasporic population in the US that punches well above its weight in economic and professional terms and the healthy numbers of Indians who work and study in the US IT industry. 

Trump’s order can be analysed with reference to the three constituencies at which it was aimed: one, members of the Republican Party; two, his core support base, the world cultivated by the President’s hard-Right right-hand man, Steve Bannon, and; three, a global audience. As an act of signalling, Trump has laid down the law, telling other Republicans to fall in line behind him, exemplifying Carl Schmitt’s theory that power, even in democracies, ultimately flows from and rests with the sovereign. To his supporters, the decision says that Trump, unlike other politicians, intends to keep his word, and that, as promised, he will shake up the cozy world of the Washington establishment. It is no coincidence that Trump has communicated his intent to run again in 2020 at this unusually early stage. And to the world, the action says that Trump’s administration will not be burdened by the obligation of following a certain conception of America as a land of immigrants and a bastion of equality and freedom. Rather, Trump intends to remake that image of America according to his own vision of a defiant go-it-alone superpower.

Despite its insistence that this is not a “Muslim ban,” it is hard to see how the order can be seen entirely outside the politics of race, ethnicity, and national origin. There have been instances of not just green card holders but American citizens originally from “brown” countries being strip-searched or submitted to impromptu loyalty tests by immigration officials. On Twitter, which has been a source of a constant stream of information since news of the order broke, an American citizen of Lebanese origin shared his experience of being asked if he loved America. An Indian-American, self-identifying as a Hindu and Brahmin, described the ordeal of her 68-year old father, a US citizen for close to two decades, being strip-searched by TSA officials. She noted, though, that the TSA officials were not to blame as they were just following orders.

Most revealing in this regard — and, indeed, worrisome — is Bannon’s outsize influence in the administration, and his troubling record of White nationalist rhetoric, self-described as the “alt-right” view. According to media accounts, it was Bannon who decided, in contravention of the view of experts, that the executive order should also apply to legal permanent residents or green card holders.

It bears noting that since the announcement of the order, citizens of the UK and Australia have been granted an exemption from the new requirements. As a symbolic gesture, this very much draws a line between “us” and “them,” the world of White-majority Anglo countries whose people may stake a special claim upon the United States, and the world of “brown” countries, whose folk may not. One of the likely consequences of the order, already seen in sporadic instances at airports, may be to embolden immigration officials to act in discriminatory and invasive ways towards Muslims or brown-skinned people. 

Last week, a Democratic lawmaker from Silicon Valley California, Zoe Lofgren, also introduced a bill seeking to limit the H1-B visa program. It doesn’t take much imagination to infer that the bill is squarely aimed at the many Indians who work in the US IT sector, most visibly in Silicon Valley’s high-profile firms like Google, Apple, and Facebook. The bill is unlikely to pass, with the Republican administration planning to introduce its own version. That too, however, will target Indians and possibly the Chinese, in the name of protecting American jobs, as Trump had vowed to his supporters. 

What is not being said outright, of course, is that the idea of America that informs both these policies implicitly presupposes White Americans to be the authentic inhabitants of the country, those to whom the country belongs and whose interests must be protected first. But one does not have to look very far for explicit confirmation of that view. Bannon is on record having said that US technology companies have too many Asian CEOs. 

It is not entirely unlikely, then, that we may see more restrictions on student visa holders, green card holders, and even naturalised US citizens of Indian origin, qualifying as they do on two fronts in what may be called the White nationalist imagination of Bannon & Co.: ethnic outsiders and job-stealers. It is said that the Chinese have a curse, “May you live in interesting times.” If the last week is any indication, for Indians and Indian-origin folks in the US, as well as those dreaming of making their way to the promised land, very interesting times lie ahead.