The migration taking place in Punjab in the guise of international students , who won’t return, is alarming because it is unnatural. There are no government figures available, but estimates put the number of students leaving for foreign shores annually at 30,000. A report by Iqbal Singh Sidhu
On many occasions I have walked into a restaurant and the unsuspecting cashier behind the till has asked me if I was there to pick up a food order for Skip or Doordash or the myriad other food delivery services that have become ubiquitous in Canada. They suspected me of this not because I wear a driver’s jacket, but because I fit the profile of the quintessential delivery driver in modern Canada: I am a male, of South Asian descent, in my 20s and have that haggard, overworked look. So fast have the profile of such professions in what is fancily called the ‘gig economy’ proliferated and has been fast filled by young students and workers who have migrated from Punjab that it is impossible to not have at least one person in my social circle who delivers food for a living.
Not in the too distant past, a motormouth Canadian official had half-jokingly boasted ‘‘we have the most well-educated taxi drivers in the world.’’ He was of course referring to the immigrants – mostly of South Asian descent- who had found employment in ferrying passengers on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver after graduating from universities in their native India and Pakistan. I once had the chance of meeting an Indian taxi driver who used to be a professor in Punjab, India. Upon my asking why he had left the cushy chair in an office to wallow in the dust of Chicago streets, he said he had only come on a preliminary fact finding tour. From there, how he had ended up behind the wheel of a cab, he hadn’t quite yet put together. I think he mentioned something about securing his ‘children’s future.’
Human migration is nothing new; we are all after-all the descendants of migrants who left the African continent some 40,000 years ago. Civilizations have thrived, composed entirely of migrants. More than 80% of the Americas today is composed of migrants and their descendants. But the migration taking place in Punjab in the guise of international students who won’t return is alarming because it is unnatural. There are no government figures available, but estimates put at least 30,000 students leaving home annually. Comparable in numbers to the flight of the Irish during the Great Irish Potato Famine in the mid 18th century, and the migration of Ukrainians during Stalin’s Holodomor in the 1930s, the migration facing Punjab today is the third largest danger faced by that small province after Climate Change and a potential nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan.
