Immigration Not just for the USA anymore...

[133724]

Migrant workers killed in Assam

Police in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam say six people have died in attacks by separatist rebels against migrant workers.

A police official told the Associated Press news agency the United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) had said it carried out Tuesday night's attacks.

Seventy Hindi-speaking migrants were killed in Assam in January.

Ulfa is fighting one of India's longest running insurgencies to establish an independent homeland in Assam.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6660333.stm

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. You are aware that's not immigration, aren't you?

Unless you call someone born in New York an immigrant when they work in Los Angeles, that is ...

[dave_p]

2. It never was

The US contains only a fifth of the world's international migrants (less than its ahare of the world economy), and until the 1990s its share was even less. Internal migrants in India alone number more than all the world's international migrants. Indians have been on the move for centuries: Assam drew in half a million tea plantation laborers in the 1890s alone and a similar number of Bengali Muslim settlers in 1905-30, followed by two million or so Hindus from East Pakistan in 1947-71. It's the threatened minority status of the relatively sparse initial indigenous population that's caused the particular political problem: elsewhere, migration's been less explosive - everybody does it and there are usually enough natives to hold their own.