The Great Pajeet Reckoning

On the Changing Face of the Indian Immigrant

There is a common story that unites all immigrants and children of immigrants: my parents worked hard to move us to a better place and give us a better life, better education, safer place to grow up, and better opportunities. These parents are often lauded as hardworking, sincere, and honest people willing to sacrifice for their children’s future. Unspoken in this narrative is that, at least in the last fifty years, the places these immigrants come from is always a non-western country and the place that they immigrate to is always a western country. This little detail is always left out because the immigrant, even as he benefits from the west, cannot admit to its superiority in any way, except in private conversations among family members.

Escaping the Third World

Western systems are what allow hardworking and competent people to succeed in the first place. Somehow, the west was able to build and enforce social and civic infrastructure that guaranteed safety from bodily harm, functioning judicial systems and the guarantee of basic human rights. Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in a third world, non western country, will admit to the cunning and vigilance, bribery and nepotism, required for the average every-day survival of someone there. We are trained to think otherwise because the west also permits its own criticism via protections of free-speech whereas other countries do not. However, over the last ten years, this has rapidly changed in the west. The West is becoming more and more similar to the third world countries that these immigrants so desperately fled, and a huge part of the reason is the wanton derision for the west that has been permitted and in fact instructed in education systems around the world and mainstream media.

We owe a lot to the West. I have described it more in detail in another essay.

In the rest of the world outside the west, if you are deceived or betrayed, it is your fault for being gullible. It is considered the height of foolishness to expect honesty and decency from others. Degrees can be bought. Qualifications faked. And what form or requirement cannot be acquired by greasing the hand of a bureaucrat?

This system is inhospitable to anyone with true merit because they will always be the object of exploitation from those whose primary skill is knowing how to take advantage of others. This is why it has historically been so easy for countries like America, Australia and Canada to acquire the best minds and talents from China, India and Africa. It easily attracts people who want to be rewarded for their quality of their work, rather than waste their energy staying abreast every day corruption—who want their children to grow up in safe neighbourhoods, move West. 

The American Dream is a branch of this idea. Of course the massive economic superiority of the United States plays a role in it, but consider the fact that there are lots of countries today with great economic success that their average citizen can never access. The American Dream was different because it is a product of the western system that allowed every common man to access the success of its country.

I will not so naively dismiss the fact that there is corruption in Western Countries too. However, this corruption exists at a different echelon of society entirely. The average person in these countries does not exist in a culture of being constantly in danger of being ripped off or taken advantage of by ordinary people around them. The civic culture of a high trust society in western countries (at least until the 2000s) is entirely different. This is the culture that immigrants once assimilated to; if not themselves then their children, certainly. 

The 90s were good

Speaking now specifically of Canada (although I know this pattern exists elsewhere such as America and the United Kingdom), and of Indian immigrants, it is clear that the reputation of Indian immigrants was very positive or at the very least neutral. Indians had the stereotype of being studious, hardworking, family oriented and polite. In a way it was very similar to the Chinese immigrant reputation. There was very little racial tension in the 80s, 90s and 2000s regarding race. It is as if, and I am not too conspiratorial in suggesting this, the race wars were engineered to distract and divide the population in the 2010s specifically. And there were many ways, culturally, that it was already building.