Shikha Mukerjee | Resolve Migration Issue To Tackle ‘Illegals’ Crisis

The 2025-26 election season has resurrected the description of “ghuspethiya” for illegal migrants and punched it up, transforming the intensive revision of electoral rolls into a “Special Intensive Revision” for the purpose of producing “pure electoral rolls,” as chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had recently asserted. As the process progresses across nine states and three Union territories, it is not as yet clear what will happen to the 65 lakh deleted voters from the Bihar electoral rolls. Will they end up in expensive-to-run and mostly unmanageable detention centres?

The cocktail of ethnic chauvinism, nativist rhetoric and exclusionary nationalism is entirely populist in nature and purpose and it works in different ways for the multiplicity of political parties with different ideologies and inflection points. That is, ethnic chauvinism, nativist rhetoric and exclusionary nationalism, are useful in India’s present social, religious, political and economic composition and competitive elections.

In that respect, India is one more, and the world’s largest democracy, that is intensely exercised about the presence of illegal migrants, as defined by versions of the Citizenship Act and the revised Immigration and Foreigners Registration Act 2025. With due apologies for the colonial/Westernised mindset that finds comparisons with countries like the United States, in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and several other European countries, the fact is that in the 21st century it is striking that there has been a significant rise and spread of political parties advocating the idea that immigrants, illegal immigrants and non-natives pose a threat and are to be feared because the “native” (sic!) majorities are in danger of being outnumbered.

The people who come into countries like India, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and others, do so for many different reasons; they are trafficked in by networks and or make their way in through illegal border crossings or beach landings as illegal entrants, in search of economic, social and personal security or for political reasons. Once in, like all immigrant groups, they sell their labour cheap and contribute to increasing the wealth of nations, specifically the host nation.

The value of migrant workers has been reconfirmed by US President Donald Trump after triggering chaotic disruptions over visas, deporting foreign workers allegedly violating visa conditions, often in chains, and packing off suspected illegals-undocumented-terrorists-criminals to detention centres. The about-turn over H-1B visas, earlier in November, came because the United States had an urgent need “to bring in talent” and to “teach our people”, or finance colleges with international money. This tells it all -- immigrants are necessary regardless of the political fallout for the “America First” and “Make America Great Again” campaign promise.

The surge in ethnic chauvinism, nativist rhetoric and exclusionary nationalist discourse in India, around the time of all elections, is part of the anti-Liberal-Left, hardening Rightist politics across the world. In states where the narrative of demographic changes to the majority Hindu communities’ status is allegedly a threat because of inflows of illegal migrants of Muslims from Bangladesh and Rohingyas from Myanmar, the Right-Liberal-Left confrontation is inevitable. There are some differences in the details between countries and why they harbour illegal immigrants.

India’s rules are peculiar in that sense and framed within the ethnic chauvinist-nativist-exclusionary nationalist discourse. Illegal immigration is a crime for starters; and Muslims are excluded from applying under the Citizenship Amendment Act; there is no transparency about how many can be, usually or annually, given permits to work or apply for citizenship. The policy is framed to be restrictive.

There is no data that is not an estimate or even guesswork as only 3,500 people between January and July 2025 were detected as illegal migrants. There are estimates of how many Bangladeshis are living in India without valid documents; the number varies between two crores and less. In contrast, between 2009 and 2025, some 16,000 Indians were deported from the US to India as illegal immigrants.

However, the “ghuspethiya” story is a favourite potboiler. In 2024, for the Jharkhand Assembly election, it was expected to power the Bharatiya Janata Party to a majority. It did not. From 2016, the story in all its variations was used to drive the BJP’s appeal and cut into the Trinamul Congress’ dominance in West Bengal. The less than successful outcomes, in the 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024 Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, has not served as a demonstration that Hindu vote bank politics, up against Muslim vote bank politics, is not a winning strategy.

The SIR 2025-2026 is expected to weed out the illegal migrants, or that is what Union home minister Amit Shah implied as much in his speech last week: “SIR is a purification of the voters’ list… We will deport every single infiltrator from this country. This is our resolve.” That is, the Election Commission will do the job of detecting, while the home ministry and the machinery of the Border Security Force and intelligence-gathering agencies fail and have failed over years.

The problem is not just the borders. India said it had closed its border with Bangladesh after the deposed Sheikh Hasina fled and received sanctuary in India. It prompted Mamata Banerjee to declare that no one would be turned away if they sought sanctuary in India in troubled times.

The problem is with the policy. In the 1990s, the then Union home minister, L.K. Advani, also of the BJP and the RSS, had floated the idea of long-duration work permits; something like the Green Card in the United States and the “Indefinite Leave to Remain” certification in the UK that enables non-citizens to live and work, pay taxes and receive social security benefits, but not vote in these countries. Had India’s various governments, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance or the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, spent 30 years in negotiating with South Asian neighbours on how it would host non-Indian migrant workers, it may have been able to save money on policing and failing at policing the borders.

It would be cheaper and better if India had worked harder on resolving the problem of migration across South Asia instead of producing annually yet another “ghuspethiya” pot boiler. It would have saved money on political campaigns and on setting up detention centres for lakhs of “D” (deleted) voters, as has happened in Assam. If, though it is a remote possibility, the Indian government were to think about it as a cost and efficiency problem, it may feel driven to find a solution on voters, illegal migrants with dubious credentials.