Every year, according to William Frankel, about a million people emigrate to the United States. Seventy per cent of them come legally. Thirty per cent ‘will either have crossed a border surreptitiously or overstayed a visa limitation. In the case of the latter, the immigration authority is notoriously ineffective in rounding them up.’8

What Frankel does not say, but which is widely accepted, is that many of these illegal aliens are forced to work as daily wage labourers on farms, or in sweat shops as low-paid labour by unscrupulous employers who threaten to turn them in to the authorities should they squeal about their conditions. In numerous cases, the employers are their own kin or ‘countryfolk’, who have done reasonably well in life but are not above bending or twisting the law in order to do better.

Frankel makes another important point here—that the diasporas are forcing Americans to speak of ‘multiculturalism’, and no longer of assimilation. But a time will come, he warns, when ethnic assertions of separate identities will not be as easily tolerated as they are now and critics of immigration ‘now unheeded, are likely in time to find more support.’

There are two timely warnings here: one, that while the force of numbers, of demography, will change politics and social conditions, they will also lead to clear assertions of separateness. Two, that even in developed countries, the walls against immigrants have gone up. Indeed, they have been up for many years and the far right in Europe and the United States, not leaving aside Africa, Asia and Australia, are poised to make major gains everywhere. Globalization does not necessarily mean that countries and peoples shed their ethnic and cultural biases along with tariffs.

The North East of India is a good glass bowl in which to observe such developments. It is home to many splendoured, complex, even exotic, communities. In an extremely heterogenous and ethnically sensitive society, where the redressal of one group’s grievances is seen as an assault on the concerns of another, these demands for small separatenesses will grow—but they will be marginalized by the numerically larger groups, whether it is the Assamese-speaking Hindus or the Bengali-speaking Bengalis, Hindus or Muslims. This is a reality and protecting these groups will become a major task, not merely of governments but of those very communities themselves. The most transparent and appropriate way of given true protection is to provide better governance, that brings about economic equity as well as meets basic needs. This must be backed up by a legal, and constitutional framework that is sensitive to local concerns and accomodates them to the maxmimum degree.

Constitutions can be changed. They have been amended scores of times, as in the case of India. But the boundaries of a nation remain immutable. Millions of people, voting with their feet, may not recognize that. Their movement does not change the fact that a border exists. Indeed, their migration reinforces that reality, for it means that they have to resort to unfair means to cross a boundary and enter a different country. They may have made it legally. But they have chosen not to because they do not want to, and because they find this form of moving easier, even if it is riskier.