When Rishi Sunak became Britain’s new prime minister in October, Indians across the world took note. The 42-year-old Sunak is the first British prime minister of Indian origin and a Hindu — and he’s wealthier than the British king.
Some celebrated his ethnic identity for bringing Indians their “Obama moment,” overturning Britain’s racist colonial history. Others, however, worried that his personal wealth would obfuscate Downing Street’s attention to British-Indian workers.
Sunak credits his personal success to his immigrant family’s sacrifice, hard work and “character and actions.” But the achievements or difficulties of migrants don’t simply depend on their personal qualities.
As I show in my recent book, they also depend on government policy — in countries that receive migrants and in countries that send migrants abroad.
Although migrant-receiving countries can’t overtly discriminate along racial lines to determine who gets entry visas, they can and do legally discriminate by class based on income, assets, education and skill levels. Sunak, for example, rationalizes his promise to crack down on immigration into the U.K. by “unapologetically” allowing in high-skilled immigrants, while preventing the entry of unskilled, illegal, and student migrants seeking “low-quality” degrees.
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And countries that send migrants abroad discriminate by class, too.
India is the world’s largest democracy, migrant exporter and receiver of remittances from emigres. Yet for decades, India forbid its poor and uneducated citizens from emigrating. Today, India still imposes restrictions on poor citizens who seek to leave, while granting its elite, educated emigrants special privileges, rights and benefits.
Sunak and his fans might like to believe that his family succeeded through individual gumption. However, the evidence suggests that government policies on immigration and emigration may have had a lot to do with it.
Discrimination began with the British Empire
In 1835, Ramdas Sunak (Rishi Sunak’s paternal grandfather) left India to work as a clerk in Nairobi. He was one of a small number of Indians who migrated after the implementation of England’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act forced the British colonial regime to use poor indentured Indian laborers to service plantations across the British Empire.
Ramdas Sunak wasn’t an indentured laborer — he and other educated emigrants helped manage overseas Indian laborers, exports and employer needs. In my research, I found that these emigrants experienced heavy racism. But unlike poor Indian emigrants, educated emigrants typically had some initial capital, and were not trapped by a government-sanctioned bonded labor contract. In the colonial regime’s official terminology, emigrants like Ramdas Sunak were “respectable temporary sojourners” who could move freely back and forth even though many opted not to return to India. After immigrating, they typically kept themselves apart from their poorer fellow Indian immigrants.
This official discrimination in human migration didn’t get better after Indian independence. From the 1950s (when Rishi Sunak’s parents moved from East Africa to the U.K.) until the early 1980s, the post-colonial Indian government legally forbid poor Indians from migrating out of India. The government retained the colonial-era 1922 Emigration Act to control who did and did not leave the country. The government claimed these restrictions would protect India’s poor from foreign exploitation — but in practice, they further cemented inequality.
Educated citizens, by contrast, could move abroad to pursue opportunities such as those outlined in the U.S. 1965 Immigration Act, which only allowed educated immigrants (and family members of existing immigrants) to enter the United States. The Indian government provided favorable settlement packages, including medical and educational support. For a brief period, the Indian government even subsidized fares on the national airline, Air India, to help educated Indians emigrate to Commonwealth countries.
Poor Indians still have a hard time emigrating
In 1983, the Indian government finally updated the 1922 Emigration Act to allow poor Indians to emigrate. But despite their hard work and sacrifice, it is unlikely that India’s millions of poor emigrants will ever achieve Sunak’s level of success, because, unlike educated Indian emigrants, they are subjected to heavy restrictions while leaving India.
Under India’s 1983 Emigration Act, poor emigrants have to hire a government-certified recruiter, fill out piles of government paperwork, pay huge fines and hope for government approval. Unlike Ramdas Sunak’s experience in the 1830s, they usually emigrate without family members on temporary visas, working under difficult conditions for little pay under the control of their foreign employer.
Although these emigrants send home the largest share of India’s massive remittances — an estimated $100 billion in 2022, and which have saved India through multiple financial crises and cover 40 percent of the basic needs for millions of poor households — they receive little acknowledgment or support from the Indian government.
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Educated emigrants, by contrast, are free to leave India as they please. Since the 1980s, the Indian government has offered them awards and special financing options for savings accounts, investments and bonds within India. The government has also encouraged their temporary return to India with business partnerships and high-level positions within the Indian government. Receiving countries are also more likely to welcome educated Indians than poor immigrants.
Today, Indians comprise the most educated and wealthiest ethnic group in the United States. My research finds that Indian Americans attribute their success to their hard work and education — much like Sunak does. They make charitable contributions to support education in India. But they rarely credit the Indian government policies (or the government financing of their Indian education) that have enabled them — but not all Indians — to use their education to become part of a global cosmopolitan elite.
It would have been unthinkable, during the colonial era, that someone like Rishi Sunak could become U.K. prime minister. Indians didn’t rise to power under colonialism — they were subjected to it, suffering racial discrimination and violence.
Even so, Sunak’s rise to the top in U.K. politics reflects the colonial era’s persisting legacy of discrimination, as post-colonial governments continue to limit human mobility by class. This legacy not only belies simplistic narratives about the “success” of a small minority of hard-working immigrants, it also undermines the anti-colonial ideals of equality and freedom for all.
Rina Agarwala is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of “The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration” (Oxford University Press, 2022).