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immigrants we let in to work and pay
into the system, the more likely retirees
are to not have to open cans of dog food
for their dinner. America’s problem, in
the years ahead, isn’t going to be that
too many people are coming here. It’s
going to be that too few might want to.
Just as America mines bauxite or cop-
per from foreign countries, it has, until
Donald Trump, been good at finding the
human resources it needs abroad. Take
India, for instance, where I grew up until
I moved to the U.S. at age 14. Unlike
the British, the U.S. isn’t directly impli-
cated in the plight of India, where levels
of malnutrition among its children are
some of the highest in the world. But it
benefits, as the British did, from having
Indian immigration. We are the third
largest immigrant group (after Mexicans
and Chinese)—there are over 4 million
of us in the U.S. Starting in 2013, more
Indians than Mexicans have entered the
U.S. We are recent arrivals; only 31% of
us were born here. But we made up for
lost time. In 2016, India sent more im-
migrants to the U.S. than did any other
country on the planet.
Indian Americans are the most suc-
cessful ethnicity in the U.S.: we have the
highest median incomes and the high-
est educational attainment. Seventy-
seven percent of us over the age of 25
have a college degree (which is 2½ times
the American rate); more than half of
college-educated Indians in America
have a postgraduate degree. We are 8%
of America’s doctors. Up to a fifth of all
startups in Silicon Valley were founded
by Indians.
As a minority, we are the model.
But it’s not because Indians are some
sort of master race; if that were the
case, what explains India? America
skims off the “creamy layer,” as we
used to call the elite of the lower
castes in India, from other nations.
Most of the immigrants who come
here are substantially better educated
and richer than the countrymen they
left behind. We do not come empty-
handed, mine host!
truMp and Jared Kushner have
proposed a new immigration plan that
would change the family- based sys-
tem to a “merit”- based system in which
skills, knowledge of English and an abil-
ity to assimilate will take precedence
over family connections. In 2017, two-
thirds of the 1.1 million green cards that
America gave out went to relatives of
U.S. residents; only 12% were attained
through employment.
If America’s immigration system were
to be based on “points”—if it lifted its
lamp only to the highly skilled—then my
own family and those of many other In-
dians would never have been allowed in.
I am in the U.S. as a result of “family re-
unification,” or what Trump calls “chain
migration.” We haven’t taken a dime in
welfare. When we needed money, we
borrowed from family. For immigrants,
the family isn’t a chain. It’s a safety net.
My mother came here in 1977 be-
cause her sister in Detroit, a U.S. citi-
zen, sponsored her and her husband and
their three small children. My mother
wouldn’t have gotten a visa based on
her skills. Because, as I discovered re-
cently, my mother never finished her
college degree.
In March 1963, in Mumbai, my
mother was in the back of a taxi with
two of her friends from the elite Sophia
College, going to her uncle’s house for
dinner. In a month, she was to get her
bachelor of arts, in philosophy and
French, after her final exams. She was
confident of the results; she was a good
writer, and her essays would be shown
around as a model for other students.
She had married my father the previous
year and was now five months pregnant
with me.
The taxi pulled into a petrol pump
to get refueled, and her friends insisted
that she move to the middle because
she was pregnant. The taxi drove out
of the pump, and a drunk driver came
speeding down, broadsiding the taxi.
Her friend sitting near the window had
multiple fractures. The friend sitting
on the other side was also hurt, and the
taxi was totaled. But my mother seemed
to be largely unhurt, except for some
bleeding around the hip.
The doctor told her this. He also said,
“If it was my own sister, I would tell her
not to sit for the exams,” which involved
sitting for six hours at a stretch, and
now there was this accident. “You
can take the exams if you want, but
it could be risky for the baby.” So my
mother rested in bed for some time,
then went to Kolkata to join my father,
and had me. But of course studying was
impossible for a new mother. She never
got her B.A. She had never mentioned
this incident to me until now.
So I said it, in my parents’ car, as
we were coming up to the George
Washington Bridge, 36 years after the
accident: “You gave up your college
degree for me.”
“Yes,” she replied. “But it was worth
it, because I got ... you.”
My mother is, like most immigrants,
an ordinary hero. Like most immigrants
with kids, she wants what parents
want: a better life for her children,
for whom a college degree is the least
of the things she is prepared to give
up. The most American of values is
family. When we allow family to be
reunified, we will find merit in the most
unexpected places.
Adapted from Mehta’s forthcoming book,
This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s
Manifesto, published by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux
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