The Rwanda scheme presents troubling echoes of the UK’s imperial past: the colonial transportation of slaves and indentured workers across continents and seas..
The largest mass migrations in South Asia since the time of partition are taking place in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indians are on the move in every direction from the major urban centres, criss-crossing the nation on their way homeward to towns and villages across the country.
Yet again, a photograph erupts into the collective sightline: a picture of a father and child who drowned whilst attempting to cross over from Mexico to the United States.
Who exactly is a migrant? Is it my fellow traveller, the person queuing at the border or the neighbour from another country who lives next door to me but, like me, came here from another place? Who, among us all, is not a migrant?
That same idea fuels the struggle of displaced persons today. Whether driven by hunger, violence or poverty, they arrive in their host country hoping to become ordinary – different in ethnicity and culture, perhaps – productive citizens.
