The American Tumult and its impact on migration
In the summer of 2018, I hailed a cab from Midtown Manhattan to Harlem’s Upper West Side with a friend. As we settled in, Punjabi music filled the car. My Texas-born friend, assuming the driver was from South Asia, asked if I understood the lyrics. After a brief hesitation, I replied, “Yes, but not all the words.”
The song was indeed Punjabi, but in a dialect distinct from what I was familiar with—urban Punjabi spoken by migrants from Pakistan or those with family roots from undivided Punjab like myself. The driver, assuming I was Sikh and from Indian Punjab, struck up a conversation in Punjabi. He revealed that he had been in New York for three-years. He had first arrived in Nicaragua in central America and then made his way to the U.S. illegally via Mexico. He had applied for asylum,...