Anti-immigration protests absorb the culture, but shun its creators

Ali Ahmed Aslam, widely known as the founder of chicken tikka masala, passed away in Glasgow in 2022 at the age of 77. If he were alive today, he would have woken up to the sight of nearly 1.5 lakh people at anti-immigration protests in London, chanting to “reclaim their country.” Only to later notice some of them eating chicken tikka masala, onion bhaji, and other quintessential staples of Indian cuisine. Irony does not just die in moments like this. It becomes the bedrock of how countries, including India, treat minorities it benefits the most from. 

Irony runs like a red thread through the immigrant experience. Consider the app most people love to hate: ChatGPT, and its many cousins. Public anxiety lingers on water wastage and cognitive impairment, yet the most immediate concern is consistently ignored. Artificial  Intelligence (AI) is largely powered by underpaid immigrants from India and sub-Saharan Africa. The intelligence in AI is learned from thousands of decisions made by human moderators. Last year, The Guardian reported how Kenyan workers were under extreme psychological duress after having to watch hours of footage of beheadings, rape, and child abuse to train AI systems.  Across platforms like Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, tens of thousands of moderators are employed through third-party firms. While the numbers are hard to pin down, given how much of the work is outsourced or kept confidential, Meta has previously cited around 15,000 moderators, while TikTok employs about 40,000 worldwide. In India, where a large share of this work is outsourced, moderators earn roughly ₹294 ($3.50) an hour.

At anti-immigrant protests across the West, the paradox is glaring: immigrants are not wanted, b1ut their work and culture are indispensable. Ameya Chikramane, an Indian product designer based in Finland, shared with The Established his experience of witnessing protests led by far-right groups in Helsinki last year. “It was the Finnish Independence Day, and the slogans were all racist. But it wasn’t one-sided. I was with my friends protesting against them right there.”

Chikramane added that, like most Western societies, Indians are almost omnipresent as a working class that powers Finnish infrastructure—from sweepers and doctors in the hospital to nannies and tech workers. “I needed emergency care and couldn’t understand what the hospital receptionist wanted because she was speaking in Finnish. I kept requesting her to switch to English; she could understand me but just wouldn’t budge,” he says. In many ways, this was an echo, an offshoot of those far-right protests that elevate pride in one’s motherland and mother tongue above everything else. 

There is nothing new about this tension; it is what psychologists term ‘cognitive dissonance’. “Cognitive dissonance is the tension between what we believe and how we behave. People often struggle with it, like hating immigration but loving the food from those places.” says counselling psychologist Ruchi Ruuh. “To resolve the conflict, we rationalise it as two separate ideas. We also have selective morality, where the values applied to different groups vary. It acts as a way of compartmentalising prejudice while still benefiting from what is useful or pleasurable.”

Culture Without the Immigrant—An Immigration Paradox

The protests in London revealed this selective morality vividly. Nearly 150,000 protesters marched against immigration—yet viral videos showed them tucking into Indian snacks, one man pausing mid-rally for an onion bhajji. The contradictions are not subtle.

As archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Dr. Kurush Dalal points out, the so-called “national dish” of Britain is chicken tikka. “The ‘pindi’ in ‘pindi chole’ refers to Rawalpindi in present-day Pakistan. Sindhis cook pasta with potatoes because, as Partition refugees, they received UN parcels containing macaroni and simply spiced it with potatoes. Mulligatawny soup, born in the colonial era, blends elements from India, Pakistan, and England. And chicken tikka masala is not an Indian dish at all, but one that evolved in Indian kitchens in Britain. All food moves across time and space.”

But food is only one layer. The Beatles’ George Harrison learned sitar from Ravi Shankar, leading to songs like Norwegian Wood (1965) and Within You Without You(1967). The sitar-, tabla- and raga-inspired tunes float across the discography of giants like The Rolling Stones, Donovan and The Byrds. To the Indian ear, this might be exotic. But the narrative has been widely accepted in the Western world, leading to platinum and gold runs of these records. Yet, anti-Indian sentiment persists. Musician Nitin Sawhney, in an interview with the BBC in 2023, even mentioned how it was the racism he endured growing up in Rochester that “helped shape” his music.

Indian artist Reya Ahmed, who works in London after receiving an education there, tells The Establishedthat throughout her time in London as an artist, she has observed how a lot of immigrants are now being forced to return. “The quality of education might be great [in the UK], but there is an element of deception in the way education abroad is sold to people; both my universities are trying to cope with funding cuts as well as education agents back at home,” she said. “The hypocrisy here is the claim that foreign nationals don’t contribute enough, or are taking away jobs. When, in fact, the contribution from foreign students to everything in the UK, from the housing market to tuition to healthcare, is enormous.”

Ahmed clarified that the recent, very aggressive push in the UK to refrain from hiring international graduates in corporate roles or creative roles is just a way to push them into the hospitality industry—into jobs that citizens don't want to do. “It’s all very sinister,” she says. 

The contradiction stretches into tech and migration. Following the recent hike in the H1B visa fee in the US, even Elon Musk, with his warped relationship with race and identity, had to admit on X (formerly Twitter): “The reason I’m in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong, is because of H1B.” According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Indians make up 71 per cent of all approved H-1B applications in recent years. When Musk said that he is in America only because of people who got H1B and helped build his company, it’s perhaps quite telling that, earlier last week, he became the world’s first half-trillionaire. 

Irony, of course, is not confined to the West. From the AI training labs in Africa to construction sites across the GCC region, double standards sustain most economies. Labour migration expert Rejimon Kuttappan, who has covered Indian migrants in the GCC region for years, explains to The Established: “GCC countries rely on migrants—around nine million Indians alone in 2023—for construction, services, and skilled professions, while India benefits from remittances of $120 billion, according to World Bank data. Yet, political expediency drives both India and host countries to downplay this reality. Public sentiment is often anti-migrant, and admitting dependence risks fuelling demands for rights or reforms. Governments do not ‘look away’ out of ignorance; they strategically sideline the issue to maintain control, prioritising economic gain over justice.”

The erasure is systemic. Migrant workers in wealthy nations live in isolated labour camps, passports confiscated and wages withheld. They face exploitative conditions—long working hours, withheld wages, confiscated passports; yet their contributions—from building skyscrapers to cleaning cities—remain unacknowledged. “Public spaces exclude them; they are barred from malls and beaches. Local narratives brand them as ‘temporary’ or ‘outsiders,’ stripping their identity. Erasure means their labour is indispensable, but their humanity is ignored, reducing them to tools for profit,” adds Kuttappan. 

The invisibilisation of immigrant labour 

Even within India, the anti-immigration protest takes on a different hue. Indian couture—from embroidery to finishing—depends almost entirely on Muslim kaarigars, yet most are paid below minimum wage with no housing, medical, or retirement benefits. Last year, a prominent designer complained openly, at a table with editors and journalists, that she should not have to pay her Muslim artisans for the time they “wasted” on namaaz during work hours. The next time, during a family gathering for Diwali, if a relative complains that Muslims “must be shown their place,” notice whether they are wearing chikankari, a craft honed by Muslim women in Lucknow, or standing on a carpet woven in Bhadohi or Kashmir by Muslim families, sold to them by carpet brands who will spend lakhs on extensive marketing campaigns and shoots instead of paying their weavers suitable wages. 

Even Kannauj, India’s perfume capital, where Muslim craftspeople are barely managing to sustain the trusty skill of manual attar-making, multiple news reports have brought to light how successive governments have been largely apathetic towards their needs; they levy heavy taxes on the base oil used for attar, along with complicated regulations for the sandalwood trade. In the drawing rooms of South Delhi, attar is shorn of these concerns, as it comes packaged in neat wooden boxes, replete with roses and handwritten letters; it is a case of Marketing 101 where the Muslimness disappears.

In Varanasi, nearly 80 per cent of the Banarasi silk weavers are Muslims, with a report by the Ministry of Textiles in 2007 placing the figure closer to 90 per cent. In Moradabad, India’s brassware hub, about 80 percent of artisans engaged in hands-on work are also Muslim. Industries such as weaving, brassware, and fragrance are integral to daily life across faiths in India, yet each of them now stands in crisis and remains unacknowledged. 

Similarly, in West Bengal, a report published in the Valley International Journal found that nearly 60 per cent of female karigars doing hand embroidery are Muslims. Now, Bengali Muslims across India are facing various forms of harassment, being labelled as “illegal Bangladeshis”. Even in the Supreme Court-supervised exercise of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2018, nearly 1.9 million people, mostly Muslims, and some of them even freedom fighters and former members of the judiciary, were identified as illegals. Both the number and the methodology used to arrive at the number has been widely contested. 

Darshan Shah, founder of Weavers Studio in Kolkata, tellsThe Establishedthat ‘beyond borders’ is not just a phrase in the world of Indian textiles. It encompasses history, geography, culture, socio-economics, politics, religion, and much more. “Acknowledging craftspeople and giving them creative freedom—without capturing, threatening, or reducing their existence to just their religious identity—is what real freedom means, both for the label and for the labelled,” she explains. “In our world of Bengal textiles, migration histories tell stories where the yarn is spun in West Bengal and 300-count Jamdani masterpieces are woven in Bangladesh. These are shared legacies: a Hindu spinner and a Muslim weaver.”

Beyond India’s Islamophobic borders, the anti-immigrant protest and its sentiments often act as a strange equaliser. Raju Kendre, founder of the non-profit Eklavya India Foundation and currently a fellow at the University of Göttingen, argues that caste collapses in the eyes of the white man. “In the West, you may be a Brahmin and retain some social capital, but your skin is still brown. You will never be white. As a Dalit man from Maharashtra educated in Marathi, I’m actually more comfortable speaking English in the West. In India, English is caste and class. Abroad, if you are a racial or religious minority, you are uniformly discriminated against.”

The first casualties of a weakened global order that alienates and demonises migrants will always be the countries themselves. Wide sections of people in Eastern European nations keep pining for a way out, to the freer, EU-blessed shores of Western Europe. While within Europe, in the so-called Scandinavian utopias of Finland, as reported earlier in the story, a different kind of nationalism threatens to upset the balance. As American linguist and activist Noam Chomsky stated in his lecture Crisis of Immigration (2016): “Migrants are not a danger. They are in danger.”

Culture only exists if it moves, and it moves through people. Historically, some of this movement has been the result of conquests and battles, but also peaceful trade across the Silk Road, of the past and present: From the Partition creating the aforementioned Sindhi macaroni, to the pairing that created biryani, to a pair of Kolhapuri chappals turning up on the Prada runway, or to K-Pop shaping meaning for billions worldwide. 

On the digital highways of smartphones, the world has never been closer. To erect walls and refuse to venture beyond them is to pretend otherwise.  History is blunt on this point: Countries that close themselves to immigration face economic and social decline. Japan’s long resistance to inward migration has created a shrinking workforce and stagnant growth. In Eastern Europe, nationalist turns have left industries scrambling to plug labour gaps as their own citizens move westward. The lesson is consistent: Economies contract when borders close and culture suffocates. What disappears next are the foods, sounds, and crafts that make nations liveable.