Northern border overwhelmed with growing influx of Indian illegal aliens

PLATTSBURGH, NY - The nation's northern border has seen a marked influx of illegal immigration, with citizen of one country on the other side of the world arriving in droves.

Indian migrants have taken to arriving at the United States' northern border in recent months, crossing from Canada.

The wave of Indian migrants are largely enticed by opportunities to take jobs that would otherwise be held by American citizens- rather than a fear of persecution or danger in their home country, according to NPR. U.S. Customs and Border Protection have logged more than 20,000 encounters with illegals across the northern border- a paltry sum compared to crossings at the southern border, but a marked increase for the traditionally more secure frontier.

NPR's Sergio Martinez-Beltran witnessed a large group of Indian illegal migrants arrive in rural Clinton County, New York in September, quickly greeted by other Indian migrants willing to provide de facto smuggling services to New York City. 

“I rent a car, I come here,” one smuggler said of his activity. “So people coming, I’m just helping them."

Migrants willing to work for low wages had been attracted by Canada's permissive migration rules in recent years- a policy that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rolled back last month. Trudeau, a committed progressive, cited the devastating impact that open migration had wrought on youth employment and economic opportunity in Canada.

 

Pablo Bose, director of the Global and Regional Studies Program at the University of Vermont, pointed to a lack of enforcement in the American economy as an enabling factor for Indian illegal migrants seeking unlawful employment opportunities. Federal law prohibits the hiring of illegal aliens, although disreputable employers seeking to skimp on wages often hire illegals for pay below that of the minimum wage.

“We have a significant swathe of Indians who end up broadly speaking in the services and hospitality industries, especially in larger cities like New York and Chicago where there’s an ability to disappear into the immigrant workforce,” Bose said of the phenomenon.

“For some of the Indian families (the motivation) has definitely been economic opportunity, reunification with family."

Indian migration to the United States has largely come in the form of employer-sponsored visas programs offered by the federal government in recent decades. Indian candidates have formed a whopping 74.5 percent of migrants granted H-1B cheap labor visas in fiscal year 2019, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.