On June 12, the body of a little girl from India was found in the Arizona desert. Her name was Gurupreet Kaur, and she was one month away from turning 7 years old. Temperatures in the desert had reached 108 degrees. Her mother had gone to look for water and never saw her daughter alive again.
More and more people from India are making the long, dangerous journey across land and sea to reach the United States. Nearly 9,000 migrants from India were apprehended at the southern border in fiscal year 2018 — triple the year before. They are just a sliver of the large swath of humanity on the move. According to a recent United Nations report, 2018 saw more than 70 million people displaced from their homes.
My family also came from India, but under very different circumstances. We arrived in 1972, after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 overturned the racist National Origins Formula and made it easier for high-skilled labor from non-European countries to flow into the United States. We joined a nation of immigrants, but questions lingered in even the friendliest of interactions: What are you doing here? Why aren’t you doing it there, somewhere else where you belong?
