This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Calcutta-born NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta takes pro-immigration polemics to their logical conclusion: “Immigration as reparations.” Historically white countries must open their borders because whites have sinned and deserve punishment. But just lie back and think of diversity:
Indeed, a huge bill is coming due to the West. And it is one that the West is not only morally obligated to pay, but one that it should look forward to paying.
Mehta’s book is rife with anecdotes about deplorable white people saying insensitive things to his family. (His clannish loyalty to concentric circles of his people might be his best quality.) He begins with a tale of which he’s particularly proud: An Englishman in London asks his grandfather why he is in his country:
This Land Is Our Land:...
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“Because we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India…. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.
Who wouldn’t want to let in more Mehtas? They sound like a delightful family, folks who definitely have your best interests at heart.
On the other hand, the author isn’t, technically, in Britain. He’s been living in the United States of America since his Gujarati diamond-merchant family arrived in Queens in 1977. As he sums up his manifesto:
I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny…. It’s our country now.
Of course, exactly why Americans merit vengeance for the sins, real and imaginary, of the British Raj isn’t fully explained in This Land Is Our Land. But that’s not the point; the point is that you white people have money, which means you are guilty, and therefore you must pay.
Seriously, in the current Scramble for America, the potential profits for colonizers like the Mehtas are so vast that it’s only natural for their pundits to not wait around to publish until they’ve first figured out arguments that can pass the laugh test.
But Mehta isn’t just spewing racial hate for the money. Like so many immigrant Indian intellectuals, such as Angela Saini, author of the hysterical science denialist book Superior, Mehta has a giant chip on his shoulder against whites. He feels humiliated that Europe was once able to colonize India, rather than vice versa:
It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian Embassy, begging for a residence visa.
To soothe his wounded amour propre, Mehta has retconned a vision of South Asian history that is Indian supremacist crackpottery:
Consider the subcontinent. For five thousand years we had been one people, ruled undivided from the borders of Persia to China by emperors from Ashoka to Akbar…. Then the British came and ruled us for two hundred years by pitting us against each other so that we couldn’t be pitted against them…
Actually, it’s not that hard to get South Asians to divide up, in part because they’ve been genetically dividing themselves up into a mind-bogglingly elaborate caste system of petty apartheid at least since the Aryan Invasion. For example, late in his book Mehta admits:
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I immigrated over with not just my immediate family, not just my extended family, but a large part of my subcaste, the Dashanagar Vaniyas. It’s a subcategory of Gujarati merchants from the villages around Ahmedabad, “the merchants of the ten towns.”
And then he recounts how he delights in his subcaste’s annual picnic:
It was a fine day at the subcaste picnic. All my caste-fellows, young, old, were playing cricket, eating, strolling by the New Jersey lake, and the old ladies were pleased that not one of us had yet married an American.
It’s absurd, of course, for Hindus, the world’s most racist, reactionary, and inegalitarian culture, to be paid to lecture white Americans on our crimes against wokeness. It’s relevant to note that most of the new generation of South Asian pundits on the make, such as Mehta and Saini, aren’t egalitarian progressives in any abstract sense. They are regressives, loyal to their families, clans, and races. They wish their people to drive before them their enemies and hear the lamentations of their women.
