The Immigration and Foreigners Bill aims to streamline services related to immigration and visitors, including monitoring their entry, exit and stay in India. A clause of the Bill grants the Central government sweeping powers to prohibit the entry of any foreign national into India on grounds like national security, sovereignty and integrity.The Bill imposes certain harsh conditions on long-term visitors, though their numbers could only be small considering that, overall, there were only one crore foreign visitors to India in the year to March 31, 2024. The mandatory registration for all visitors can be irksome, considering the lethargy of India’s bureaucratic processes.Even so, the legislation only aims to follow the universal trend of tightening of immigration as we see in the US, UK, Europe and countries which are digging in to tackle illegal immigration that has several consequences for their societies. Control over who visits a sovereign country is getting more complex given the ease of movement across countries in a connected world, and yet it is being attempted universally for national security purposes. Countries like the US that are actively moving against illegal immigrants may also have to contend with losing a part of their workforce, particularly in the farming sector, but the message of controlling who visits and who stays and for how long serves the principle of sovereignty. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives non-Indians a right to reside in India.It is the misuse of the already existing provisions whereby governments aim to muzzle critics and other undesirable visitors from abroad that is the problem. In whatever form the final bill passes through Parliament, the fact that it satisfies a sovereign right is important. There can be no objection to the bill on the grounds of legislative competence of Parliament. The bill itself will meet the aims of modernising and consolidating the three existing immigration laws. The power to stop anyone considered inimical to the regime or undesirable in other ways like persons with just proselytising aims in mind has been subject to misuse over decades. But that does not preclude the nation from exercising its right to legislate further.The unrestricted nature of the executive power being envisaged and the lack of an appeal mechanism are two major drawbacks because absolute power tends to corrupt. Targeting persons with different ideological or political affiliation is an issue that has cropped up too frequently in India for it not to be considered the biggest reason for not allowing such sweeping powers to control entry.An appeals mechanism must be in place and must be time-bound for it to be fair, especially considering the kind of powers that may be granted to immigration officers in new laws and the all-pervasive liability of the people carriers. It may not be necessary to keep all the overreaching provisions that are being built into the controls.India’s illegal immigration issue primarily involves refugees, driven by economic reasons and the appeal of India’s freedoms compared to nearby countries like Bangladesh and Myanmar.A global estimate has it that this may lie anywhere between a low of 14 lakhs and a high of one crore, which given India’s population, is not massive. But a nation’s right to evict non-citizens is again a sovereign right. All processes must, however, satisfy the principle of fairness.
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