Punjabi Farmers Abroad: A Migration Pattern

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Punjab is a small state. It holds something like two per cent of India's population and a similar share of its land. It has nevertheless supplied a share of Indian emigration wildly out of proportion to its size, and the people it sent were, for the first century of that movement, overwhelmingly rural: cultivators from landholding families, most of them Jat Sikhs, who went abroad to work land in other countries and to send money home to buy more of it at home. The pattern is visible in the gurdwaras of British Columbia, the peach orchards of northern California, the banana plantations of the New South Wales coast and the dairy farms of the Po Valley.

The first channel was military. The British Indian Army recruited heavily in Punjab after 1857, and Punjabi soldiers and policemen were posted to Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, Shanghai and East Africa. Men who had seen those places came home with an idea of the world's geography that most villagers lacked, and from the early 1900s some went further, to the sawmills of British Columbia and the farms of the Pacific coast. Canada moved rapidly to stop them. A regulation of 1908 required immigrants to arrive by continuous journey from their country of birth, a condition impossible to meet from India because no direct steamship service existed. The most famous test of it came in 1914, when a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, chartered by a Punjabi businessman and carrying several hundred passengers, most of them Sikhs, was held in Vancouver harbour for two months and turned back. On its return to Budge Budge near Calcutta the passengers were fired on by police and a number were killed. Canada issued a formal apology in Parliament in 2016.

Land, law and the American orchards

In the United States the obstacle was property law and citizenship. Punjabi farmers had established themselves in the Imperial Valley of southern California and around Yuba City in the Sacramento Valley, working and then leasing land for cotton, peaches, prunes and rice. California's alien land laws, from 1913 onward, prohibited landholding by aliens ineligible for citizenship, and in 1923 the United States Supreme Court held in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, a Punjabi who had served in the American army, that Indians were not white within the meaning of the naturalisation statute and were therefore ineligible. Land was consequently held through American born children, through sympathetic partners or through corporations. Because immigration law made it nearly impossible to bring wives from Punjab, several hundred Punjabi men in the Imperial Valley married Mexican and Mexican American women, producing a distinctive community whose descendants carry Punjabi surnames and Spanish given names. Naturalisation rights were restored only in 1946. The Yuba City area remains one of the densest Sikh farming settlements outside India.

Australia's story runs on a parallel track. Sikh and Punjabi men came in the late nineteenth century as hawkers, cane cutters and agricultural labourers along the Queensland and northern New South Wales coast. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and the policies that followed it choked the flow to a trickle, but a small population persisted, and after restrictions were dismantled from the 1960s and formally abandoned in the following decade, the community around Woolgoolga on the New South Wales north coast grew into a substantial Punjabi Sikh banana and blueberry growing settlement with its own gurdwaras and a visible presence in the town. It remains one of the clearest examples anywhere of the pattern in miniature: a farming people who emigrated and took up farming again.

Canada eventually became the largest destination. The Fraser Valley of British Columbia, around Abbotsford and Surrey, developed a Punjabi agricultural economy built on berry farms, particularly blueberries and raspberries, alongside the sawmills that had drawn the first arrivals; the gurdwara built in Abbotsford in 1911 is recognised as a national historic site. In Italy, a much more recent flow beginning in the 1980s and 1990s took Punjabi men into the dairy farms of Lombardy and Emilia Romagna, where they became a central part of the workforce milking the herds whose output becomes Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano, with a large gurdwara at Novellara serving the community. In each case the trade being sold was competence with animals, irrigation and machinery.

Why the flow keeps going

What sustains the pattern is conditions at home. The Green Revolution, from the mid 1960s, made Punjab India's most productive agricultural state, built on high yielding wheat and rice varieties, tubewell irrigation, guaranteed procurement prices and heavy fertiliser use. It generated capital, and that capital paid for the air tickets, agents and fees of the next generation of migrants. It also generated a trap. Holdings were divided among sons and became too small to support a family at the standard of living the Green Revolution had created; the water table under central Punjab has fallen severely under paddy cultivation that the region's rainfall cannot support; input costs rose faster than procurement prices; and farm debt became a chronic problem, with a well documented incidence of suicide among indebted cultivators. Punjab also lost a decade to the insurgency and counter insurgency of the 1980s and early 1990s, which pushed many families out and left a legacy of distrust of the state.

The current movement is therefore no longer principally agricultural. The dominant route now is the student visa: young people from Punjab's small towns, trained in coaching centres concentrated in Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Chandigarh for the English language tests that Australian, Canadian and British institutions require, enrolling in vocational or coursework programmes with post study work rights as the actual goal. Household land is often sold or mortgaged to pay the fees. Alongside it runs an irregular route, known colloquially as the donkey route, in which agents move people through Central America, the Balkans or the Gulf without documents, at high cost and considerable danger. Governments in Punjab have promised to regulate emigration agents for decades with limited effect.

The relationship in the other direction remains strong. Diaspora money built much of rural Punjab's visible infrastructure, from schools and dispensaries to sports stadiums and, conspicuously, large houses standing empty most of the year. When the central government's farm laws provoked a mass agitation on Delhi's borders through the winter of 2020 and 2021, the diaspora response in Canada, Britain and Australia was immediate and organised through the same village and gurdwara networks that had moved people abroad in the first place, and it briefly became a diplomatic irritant. The corridor carries opinion as efficiently as it carries money.

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