Manu Joseph: Migrating to the US has long been a rite of humiliation

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Long before Donald Trump, from the time I remember, migration to the United States was a rite of humiliation. Yet, it was exactly what the finest of my generation prepared for.

Even the most dignified part of the process, which was the first step, where the bright applied for a student visa to go study something in science, lacked grace. An enduring memory of my childhood in Madras is the sight of a half mile-long queue of the city’s cultural elite for their fateful visa interviews. They were top rankers, IITians and doctors and those who had got job offers, and they waited for hours in the hot sun (the consulate put up sun shades only years later).

For people like me, who had no prospects and passed by Mount Road in public buses, it was the first clear sight of what prospects really looked like—a wait outside the American consulate. And my lack of prospects didn’t seem so bad. But when the bus turned a corner, a familiar fear filled all of us who chose to be artists and were apparently of no use to America and the ‘Free World’—if you were not standing in that queue with a science degree, what would become of you? That America is a “land of immigrants" is among the nonsensical flourishes of language, on par with “spirit of Mumbai." America may have once accepted all sorts of people, but they and their descendants have no particular fondness of immigrants anymore.

At most, they only want the rich and talented, and even among the talented, only those who would be of practical use. So, generations of Indians worked hard to become useful to America. Some even fooled themselves into believing they were needed because Americans were “dumb." But one way or another, talented Indians figured