in World News India Has More than 630,000 Illegals in the United States
by Neil Munro
Two Indians have been sent to jail for just three years after smuggling hundreds of Indians into the United States.
Hema Patel, 51, worked with Mexican coyotes and charged $28,000 to $60,000 to bring individuals across the Canadian and Mexican borders. When the illegals were caught, she also used her Texas bail-bonds business to spring her clients from detention, according to an ICE press release.
Patel and her business partner, Chandresh Kumar Patel, were both sent to jail for three years. Patel also had to give up her Texas house, two hotels, $7.2 million in bail bonds, $400,000 in cash and 11 gold bars, the ICE statement said.
The case spotlights the growing number of Indian workers and family members who are working illegally in the United States or are trying to smuggle themselves into the United States.
The growing numbers of illegal-immigrant Indians hope to hide among the growing number of legal Indian immigrants. For example, the illegals can take jobs in retail, service, and restaurants serving the legal Indian population.
Roughly 4 million Indians live in the United States. Roughly half are contract workers or are the spouses and children of the contract workers. At least one-sixth — or roughly 630,000 — are illegals.
A June 2019 report by the Pew Research Center said India is now the leading source of legal migrants into the United States:
More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2017, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was India, with 126,000 people, followed by Mexico (124,000), China (121,000) and Cuba (41,000).
In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that Indians are also the fast-growing group of illegal migrants. The population of Indian illegals spiked from 350,000 in 2009 to 500,000 in 2014. Their 130 percent growth far outpaced other countries — but it has since been supplanted since 2017 by the massive wave of migrants from Central America.
“The [illegal immigrant] population from India increased by 265,000, or 72 percent, from 2010 to 2017,” said a report by the Center for Migration Studies. The estimate puts the Indian illegal population at 630,000 people in 2017, including roughly 250,000 Indians who overstayed their tourist or work visas.
Another 40,000 Indians overstayed their visas in 2018.
In June 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said roughly 9,000 Indians were caught illegally entering the United States in 2018, up from 3,162 in 2017.
The 2018 Indian inflow was a surprise, one official told Breitbart News in 2018. “Overwhelmingly [they are] claiming asylum, based on political and religious discrimination back in India … it is not a script or any particular document [but] every story is pretty much the same,” the official said.
Many Indian illegal migrants are allowed out of detention to get jobs before their asylum hearings, reportedly with bonds of only about $20,000.
U.S.-based labor traffickers bring in most of the illegal migrants who sneak across the border, he said.
The Indian “facilitators in the United States are using them as indentured servants [saying] ‘Come work for me three to four years, and every paycheck I keep so much until you pay off your [debt],” the official said.
Mexican coyotes deliver the migrants to the border after taking their passports and other identification, he said. The migrants then get caught, ask for asylum, and are released because of the enormous backup in the immigration courts. Once released, the migrants can begin working for their Indian traffickers.
The identification documents are returned to the migrants once they pay off their smuggling debts, the official said.
This current inflow of Indian illegals is so large that it has created its own backlog of almost 30,000 migrant Indians waiting for asylum hearings, according to June 2019 data federal data tracked by Syracuse University.
Indian migrants have many opportunities to plead for asylum in the United States because India is so diverse. For example, Muslim and Hindu communities have been fighting each other for decades in Kashmir and other districts, while Sikhs, Christians, and lower-caste Indians suffer discrimination in the Hindu-dominated, caste-divided, polyglot patchwork country of roughly 1.4 billion people.
In response to the Indian migration, U.S. officials have begun telling Indian asylum applicants that they must first seek safety in safe areas of their home country before they can ask for asylum in the United States.
Trump’s appointee Ken Cuccinelli at USCIS reminds his asylum officers they can’t give asylum to migrants who didn’t seek safety in their home country. This is just one of many initiatives in admin’s ‘broad strategy’ to prevent a worldwide rush to America. https://t.co/4Ok7eAmnzu
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 1, 2019
Some Indian illegal migrants are protesting judges’ deportation decisions by going on hunger strike until they are released into the United States. “My clients feel that the detention system has not been fair, and they have met with judges who have an inherent bias against asylum cases from India,” their attorney Linda Corchado, told the India-West website.
The inflow of Indian illegals rarely makes the news because it is not yet a recognized idea in the established media — and it is overshadowed by the huge inrush of Central American migrants. Also, many newspapers hire immigrants to cover the immigration beat, so shifting the focus of media coverage towards the concerns of migrants, and away from the sordid business of labor trafficking and the politically important issue of the Americans’ priorities.
However, the media mentions are rising, partly because of trafficking deaths and the growing federal efforts to detain and deport the Indian illegals. In June 2019, for example, Reuters reported:
A six-year-old girl from India died of heat stroke in an Arizona desert after her mother left her with other migrants to go in search of water, a medical examiner and U.S. Border Patrol said on Friday.
The girl, Gurupreet Kaur, soon to celebrate her seventh birthday, was found by U.S. Border Patrol west of Lukeville, Arizona on Wednesday, when temperatures reached a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius), U.S. Border Patrol and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) said.
A pro-migration Indian activist blamed the U.S. government for the little girl’s death and urged that the government welcome migrants. “U.S. border militarization, forced migration, and rejection of migrants attempting to cross at ports of entry have created an environment where a child like Gurupreet can die in the desert, alone,” Lakshmi Sridaran, interim co-executive director of South Asians Leading Together, told the IndiaWest.com news site. She continued:
Until this system is completely defunded and a new one is created that upholds the dignity of all migrants – we will continue to see unspeakable tragedies, notwithstanding the countless deaths that go undocumented. While ICE and CBP have experienced unprecedented surges in their budgets, their treatment of migrants has plunged to new lows.
full story at https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/08/22/india-has-more-than-630000-illegals-in-the-united-states/