Monthly Archives: March 2011

Immigration Blog

Indian-Americans and the DREAM Act

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Although Indian-Americans take an active interest in immigration issues, the DREAM Act did not stir the same emotions among Indian-Americans as among other groups. Why?

For those who didn’t follow the spirited debate in the second half of 2010, the DREAM Act would have allowed individuals in the country illegally today to legalize their status and eventually gain a green card if they came here as children and (in the past or future) completed high school, attended college or served in the U.S. military.

The primary argument in favor of the DREAM Act is that children living in the United States illegally because of their parents should not face punishment for the sins of their fathers. Opponents argued the bill amounted to “amnesty” and that Democrats were pushing the bill for political purposes.

In the end, in December 2010, the bill failed to gain the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate. In a mostly party line vote, only three Republicans voted in favor of the bill and only 5 Democrats opposed the legislation. We don’t know the fate of the DREAM Act in this Congressional session, although House Republicans are unlikely to move it forward in its most recent reform.

Rep. Elton Gallegly, a California Republican, and the chair of the House Immigration Policy and Enforcement, wrote in a letter to the New York Times (February 25, 2011), “I am sympathetic to illegal immigrant children like Isabel Castillo who were brought here by their parents. Because their parents disregarded America’s immigration laws, they are in a difficult position. But by granting citizenship, the United States would actually reward their illegal immigrant parents, who knowingly violated our laws. It would perpetuate the problem the bill claims to solve . . . Once they become citizens, illegal immigrants could petition for their parents to be legalized; the parents could then bring in others in an endless chain.”

Immigration attorney Greg Siskind responded on his blog (December 9, 2010) to this often-made argument: “ One of the bigger myths floating around regarding DREAM is that it will lead to chain migration. The thought is that DREAMers will get citizenship and then quickly sponsor their parents for green cards. Not quite. DREAM Act recipients must wait ten years in a non-immigrant conditional status to apply for a green card. The adjustment of status will probably take a year or so to get and then a person must wait three more years for citizenship (which could take a year to get). So we’re talking about 15 years to citizenship in all likelihood. Then they FILE for green cards for their parents. But because the parents are very likely subject to reentry bars, they’ll then have to exit the country and wait TEN years before they are allowed to step foot in the U.S. with permanent residency.”

During the House floor debate on the DREAM Act, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) estimated “it will be 25 years before any person whose status is adjusted under this legislation will be able to petition for the parent that brought that kid here . . . The chain migration argument is another bogus argument, just like the amnesty argument.”

A July 2010 Migration Policy Institute study estimated that 10 percent of the 2.1 million potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act came from Asia. And according to a February 2011 Department of Homeland Security report, approximately 200,000 illegal immigrants from India were residing in the U.S as of January 2010.

However, no reliable data are available on how many potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act are from India. It’s possible there are more Indians in the United States eligible to legalize their status under the DREAM Act than we realize. But until they step forward we may never know.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

India’s Attempts at Conflict Resolution: A Balance Sheet

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The ultimate aim of a nation’s armed forces is to deter war; fighting and winning is necessary only if deterrence breaks down. As the primary underlying cause of future conventional conflict on the Indian sub-continent is likely to be unresolved territorial and boundary disputes, it is necessary to speedily resolve the existing disputes. Despite over one dozen rounds of talks between India’s National Security Advisor and China’s Vice Foreign Minister, it has not been possible to make major headway in the resolution of the India-China territorial dispute. In fact, it has not even been possible to demarcate the Line of Actual Control on the ground and on military maps so as to prevent frequent complaints about intrusions and transgressions and to minimise the probability of an armed clash between patrols. China’s intransigence and its recent claims to Tawang have led to a stalemate in negotiations. On its part India must continue to impress on the Chinese leadership the importance of the early resolution of the territorial and boundary dispute. Simultaneously, India must continue its efforts to improve border infrastructure and create adequate offensive operations capability to deter another round of conflict.

Resolution of the dispute with Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir is equally complex as, besides India and Pakistan, the people of J&K – straddling the Line of Control (LoC) – are also party to the conflict. While some progress had been made during the Musharraf regime, the General’s troubles at home led him to back off. A ray of hope had emerged once again with the installation of an elected civilian government in Pakistan but the terror strikes in Mumbai in November 2008 put paid to the rapprochement process, which is still in limbo despite recent talks between the Foreign Secretaries. Neither government has made any effort to mould public opinion for a possible solution. Entrenched political and religious constituencies on both the sides are likely to noisily stall any understanding that the two governments might reach. Hence, it is difficult to be optimistic about the early resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

In stark contrast with the difficulties of conflict resolution on the external front, the last couple of years have seen substantial progress in resolving internal conflicts. The central government’s cease-fire with the Nagas, which has now held fairly well for over a decade even while internecine quarrels among the Nagas have continued unabated, has led to tangible progress in negotiations with both the Issak-Muivah and the Khaplang factions of the NSCN and there is cause for optimism about the early resolution of the long drawn conflict. The ULFA in Assam has begun negotiations with the central government without any pre-conditions except for the break-away military wing led by Paresh Barua who is said to be taking shelter in Myanmar and is getting covert support from the Chinese. It is to be hoped that the ULFA leadership will act in a statesman-like manner for the good of the people of Assam rather than continue to pursue power for its own sake.

There is less cause for optimism regarding resolution of the conflict being waged by Maoist or Naxalite insurgents in almost 220 districts of Central India. The leadership of the CPI (Maoist) seeks to one day fly its flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi and is pursuing its aim methodically and systematically. Despite the Home Minister’s offer for talks, it continues to indulge in wanton acts of violence, kidnappings and extortion. A comprehensive three-pronged strategy that simultaneously emphasises security, development and governance – with skilful perception management – is necessary to defeat the menace of left Wing Extremism (LWE).

India-US Relations Blog

Maximum India

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The Kennedy Center’s mega-celebration of Indian culture – an extravaganza dubbed “Maximum India” – is now well underway, with sold-out performances and throngs of people in attendance. The three week long festival is the latest indicator of how decisively American perceptions about the country have changed. Not too long ago, India was regarded as the very epitome of what the term Third World meant – decrepit, destitute and pitiable.  Yet in a relatively short period of time, the popular view of India changed in critical ways. Nowadays, it is broadly viewed as a fast-rising economic and technology powerhouse and home to a vast reservoir of highly-trained brainpower that will inevitably sap the U.S. edge in innovation. When President Obama points to Bangalore as a threat to America’s competitive advantage or invokes India as part of a new “Sputnik moment,” one quickly understands how far we have traveled from yesterday’s stereotypes.

Of course, a segment of U.S. opinion, attracted to Indian cultural traditions and the moral precepts of Mahatma Gandhi, has long held the country in high regard.  But for many decades most Americans were inclined to the views of Harry S. Truman, who dismissed India as “pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges.”  Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had an even more incisive perspective: “by and large [Indians] and their country give me the creeps.”

A decade after Indian independence, Harold Issacs’s classic 1958 survey of U.S. elite opinion, Scratches on Our Minds, revealed that influential Americans held very negative perceptions of the country, associating it with “filth, dirt and disease” along with debased religious beliefs. A State Department analysis prepared in the early 1970s found that U.S. public opinion identified India more than any other nation with such attributes as disease, death and illiteracy, and school textbooks throughout this period regularly portrayed it in a most negative light. This view was again underscored in a 1983 opinion poll, in which Americans ranked India at the bottom of a list of 22 countries on the basis of perceived importance to U.S. vital interests. A generation after Harold Issacs, the 1984 adventure film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom depicted India along essentially the same lines – as a country was filled with hapless, impoverished villagers and benighted religious practices.

Official attitudes in Washington tended to parallel public opinion. U.S. policymakers during the Cold War paid only episodic attention to New Delhi and when they did it was largely a function of the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union rather a desire to meaningfully engage Indian leaders. The Kennedy administration placed considerable if anomalous emphasis on India, making a massive commitment of economic assistance. But by the end of the Johnson administration, leading Democrats grew fatigued with the country’s seemingly insuperable problems. As Dennis Kux notes in Estranged Democracies, his history of the bilateral relationship, by the late 1960s “India, in Washington’s eyes, had become just a big country full of poor people.” The Nixon administration similarly believed that India was not worthy of heavy engagement. President Nixon himself held denigrating views of Indians, seeing them as supine and indecisive, and regarded Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in an even worse light. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan was U.S. ambassador to India from 1973-75, he regularly lamented that Washington was utterly indifferent to the country’s fate; writing in his diary, he confided that it “is American practice to pay but little attention to India.”  In a cable to the State Department, he complained of dismissive attitudes, “a kind of John Birch Society contempt for the views of raggedly ass people in pajamas on the other side of the world.”

So, what accounts for the significant shift in cultural perceptions that is increasingly registered in government statements – such as, President Obama’s calling India an “emerged” country and an “indispensable partner” – and in high-profile cultural events like the Kennedy Center’s?  An obvious part of the answer lies in the dramatic turnabout in Indian prospects launched by the 1991 economic reforms. Long gone are the days when India was seen as an economic laggard or a marginal factor in global commerce. In a remarkable sign of changing fortunes, the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog in late 2010 convened seven experts for a discussion on which lessons in economic competitiveness the United States could learn from India.  Along similar lines, Fareed Zakaria in Time magazine contrasted a dejected America with an India filled with people “brimming with hope and faith in the future,” while Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times proclaimed that “It’s Morning in India.” And a new Citibank report concludes that India will likely be the world’s largest economic power by 2050.

But a less obvious, though equally important, factor is also at work: The increasing stature of Indians in American society has changed how all Americans think about India. Large-scale Indian migration to the United States did not begin until the late 1960s and though the community remains relatively small – less than one percent of the overall U.S. population – it is one of the country’s fastest-growing ethnic groups. But the community’s growing success has given it an influence and impact wholly disproportionate to its size. As one analyst puts it, “Indians in America are emerging as the new Jews: disproportionately well-educated, well paid, and increasingly well connected politically.”

According to a recent report by the RAND Corporation, Indian-American entrepreneurs have business income that is substantially higher than the national average and higher than any other immigrant group.  High-skill immigrants from India are a significant driving force in U.S. prosperity and innovation, most famously in the information technology industry.  As Vivek Wadhwa and his colleagues document, Indians stand out among immigrant entrepreneurs, having founded from 1995-2005 more U.S.-based engineering and technology companies in the past decade or so than immigrants from the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan combined.  According to industry estimates, Indians are involved in 40 percent of all start-up ventures in Silicon Valley.  India-born scientific and engineering talent is also an important pillar of the faculties in America’s top universities.

The rising profile of the Indian diaspora has helped change public opinion in relatively short order.  For example, in contrast to the traditional sentiment of disdain or pity, a February 2010 Gallup survey found that two-thirds of Americans now have a positive impression of India, a favorability level equal to that of Israel.  In my next post, I will explore further how this societal factor has contributed to the new era in U.S.-India relations and how policymakers in Washington and New Delhi can capitalize on it.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Pakistan’s Annual Deception

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By Rajiv Nayan,
Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses

The Conference on Disarmament is an organ of United Nations (UN) for negotiations on disarmament and related issues. The UN Disarmament Commission (UNDC) is the centre for pre-negotiation activities on disarmament. The FMCT is a core issue in CD negotiations. Other issues are nuclear disarmament, negative security assurances and prevention of an arms race in outer space. All 65 members have to agree before, negotiations can commence on any issue. No decision can be possible without a consensus.

Over and above other reasons articulated in previous years, Pakistan had an additional excuse this time. On earlier occasions, Pakistan had stated that the 2008 India-specific exemptions given by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) had adversely affected the strategic balance in its neighbourhood. Though it did not mention India this year, yet the language and its earlier explicit references to India leave no doubt about what it wants to convey. Referring to South Asia’s strategic environment and to a non- NPT member, Pakistan said: “…it cannot agree to negotiations on a FMCT in the CD owing to the discriminatory waiver provided by the NSG to our neighbour for nuclear cooperation by several major powers, as this arrangement will further accentuate the asymmetry in fissile materials stockpiles in the region, to the detriment of Pakistan’s security interests.”

This time, Pakistan’s objection was that India’s membership of the four multilateral export control regimes, with the support of the U.S. and other countries, would destabilise the region. In November 2010, the U.S. supported India’s candidature for membership of the NSG, the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Australia Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement. Later, France also endorsed the U.S. move. It was followed by the Russian support for the membership of those régimes of which Russia is a member – Russia is not a member of the Australia Group. Many more countries are expected to support India’s candidature given its rising global status. Pakistan’s statement in the CD showed its resentment regarding the likely modification of criteria to accommodate India in the NSG and the Wassenaar Arrangement.

It is necessary to examine the objections raised by Pakistan regarding the 2008 India-specific waiver in the NSG. Is it really going to allow India to accumulate so much fissile material that the region around Pakistan would be destabilised? Would the exemption enhance the fissile production capabilities of India? Actually, such propaganda may well serve as an excuse for Pakistan to increase its own fissile material production. In the past, some Pakistani diplomats misled the world by saying that India’s eight unsafeguarded reactors can comfortably produce 1400 kilograms of weapons grade plutonium – sufficient for around 280 nuclear weapons a year – if run for that purpose, or even more if totally dedicated to fissile material production purposes.

When the India-US civil nuclear energy agreement was being debated before the 2008 waiver, one of India’s leading strategic analysts argued in favour of the agreement saying that it would enable India to ‘release’ its indigenous uranium for nuclear weapons, and to use imported uranium for nuclear energy generation. This was one of the many arguments used by both the supporters and opponents of the agreement. However, many of these arguments were unsubstantiated and polemical. The U.S. non-proliferation community followed by the Pakistan government used some of these polemics for their convenience and propaganda. Moreover, India’s indigenous uranium can be allocated in any way by the government, so, the word—release—is basically meaningless.

First, India’s strategic and security imperatives demand that it rely on nuclear weapons mainly for deterrence. If there is a choice between national security and electricity generation, India may prefer the former. Electricity can be generated by other means – despite the growth in nuclear energy production in recent months, overall electricity generation stays around three per cent.

True, there are eight reactors in the strategic category. The categorisation of these and other fast breeder reactors outside the civil category should not imply that India would go in for unlimited and unnecessary fissile material production. These reactors are not going to produce fissile materials round the clock. India’s nuclear doctrine is one of credible minimum deterrence, meaning India will not needlessly hoard nuclear weapons and fissile materials. Moreover, a new nuclear weapon country like India has the benefit of learning from the Cold War experience of nuclear weapons accumulation by the two super powers. The unnecessary accumulation of nuclear weapons created the problem of disposal – not only of nuclear weapons through arms control – but also of excess fissile materials.

Even if we accept the logic that the reactors outside the civil category may be used to produce fissile materials, under the Indo-US nuclear deal India has increased its number of power reactors in the civil category from 6 to 14. Therefore the increase in the number of power reactors in the civil category and the decrease of power reactors outside it should indicate that Indian fissile material production may be decreased, not increased. Any logical analysis would underscore this. Of course, propaganda has its own logic!

This leads to the question: If India is not interested in unnecessary production of fissile materials, why is it retaining eight reactors in the strategic category? The answer is simple: to deal with an uncertain strategic environment. There are some declared NPT and non-NPT nuclear weapon countries which have not made their fissile material stockpiles public. The nuclear weapon declarations of these countries are also uncertain and lack credibility. At the same time, there are undeclared and potential nuclear weapon countries, which are likely to further complicate the strategic environment in the future.

The new Pakistani argument against FMCT negotiations in the CD, namely, that the Indian membership of the multilateral export controls regimes may adversely affect regional stability, is superficial. The membership of the regimes has nothing to do with regional stability; in fact, it is about enabling India to play a role in promoting international peace and stability by participating in the global strategic trade management. Pakistan’s obsession with projecting itself as a competitor to India is frequently leading it to make ridiculous and incomprehensible moves like the one in the CD. Instead, it may do well to imitate India’s responsible nuclear behaviour. It does not realise that the proliferation network and terrorism may not be able to sustain the Pakistani state for long. Pakistan needs to change.

(This post originially appeared at IDSA. USINPAC and IDSA are content partners.)

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

The Dragon Bares its Fangs

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China’s Increasing Defence Expenditure is a Cause for Concern

While India’s defence budget for financial year (FY) 2011-12 has remained unchanged in inflation-adjusted real terms (1,64,425 crore, US$ 36 billion), the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China has been given a 13 per cent increase in planned defence expenditure to US$ 91.5 billion). Though China’s official defence expenditure (ODE) is now about 1.5 per cent of its GDP, China’s GDP has been growing consistently at over 10 per cent per annum. Consequently, given its low inflation base and a strong Yuan, China’s defence expenditure has grown at over 10 per cent annually in real terms over the last decade.

Credit: Telegraph.co.ukChinese analysts invariably claim that the rather steep hike is “caused by the sharp increase in the wages, living expenses and pensions of 2.3 million People’s Liberation Army officers, civilian personnel, soldiers and army retirees.” However, other defence analysts look at the spectacular anti-satellite test successfully conducted by China in January 2007, pictures of the first Chinese aircraft carrier under construction, the acquisition of SU-30 fighter-bombers with air-to-air refuelling capability, the drive towards acquiring re-entry vehicle technology to equip China’s ICBMs with MIRVs, a growing footprint in the South China Sea and cannot not help wonder whether a 21st century arms race has well and truly begun.

China’s military aims and modernisation strategy were clearly enunciated in the Defence White Paper of December 2006. “The first step is to lay a solid foundation by 2010, the second is to make major progress around 2020, and the third is to basically reach the strategic goal of building informationised armed forces and being capable of winning informationised wars by the mid-21st century.”

Due to China’s vigorous military modernisation drive, the military gap between India and China is growing every year. India needs to invest more in improving the logistics infrastructure along the border with Tibet, in hi-tech intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems for early warning and in generating land- and air-based firepower asymmetries to counter China’s numerical superiority. India also needs to raise and suitably equip more mountain strike divisions to carry the fight into Chinese territory if it ever becomes necessary.

All of these capabilities will require a large infusion of fresh capital. India’s growing economy can easily sustain a 0.5 to 1.0 per cent hike in the defence budget over a period of three to five years, especially if the government shows the courage to reduce wasteful subsidies.

China’s overall aim is to close the wide military gap between the PLA and the world’s leading military powers, particularly in hardware designed to provide strategic outreach capabilities. Consequently, India must enhance its investment in modernising its armed forces so that they are not found wanting in case of another conflict in the Himalayas in future, both in terms of the adequacy of force levels for carrying the conflict into Tibet and the military hardware (firepower, crew-served weapons and C4I2SR), that is necessary to fight at altitudes above 11,000 feet on the Tibetan Plateau.