P. K. Balachandran
The United States is a land of immigrants. And yet there has been strong resistance to immigrants, especially of low skilled non-White people from the Global South.
Being the land of opportunity in a world that is generally impoverished and racked by conflict, people from poorer and politically unstable countries try to enter the US by fair means or foul.
Although the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US is now identified with the two Trump Presidencies, successive US Presidents have also deported illegal immigrants, predominantly low-skilled non-Whites. These immigrants could not gel with the local culture or were taking away jobs from poor White Americans.
However, it is President Trump who is pioneering a policy of deporting illegal immigrants and hardened American criminals to another country which has not been a significant source of immigration. This country is El Salvador in Central America. Interestingly, El Salvador had offered to take the detainees including hardened criminals and American citizens.
Thus, El Salvador is set to emerge on the world map as a “penal settlement” which characterised the Colonial era. In the Colonial-era, Australia was a penal settlement for the British. So was the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, or Siberia in the days of the Soviet Union. The UK had recently planned to send illegal immigrants to Ruwanda in East Africa, but was thwarted by a court order.
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