Rishi Sunak highlights the great success of Indian migrants

National Post, 06 November 2022

Sunak’s remarkable rise would be significant even if he did not land the top job

Rishi Sunak, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, draws attention to the success of Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, a phenomenon mirrored here in Canada.

Sunak’s remarkable rise — at 42, he’s the youngest prime minister since William Pitt the Younger and the first South Asian to hold the premiership — would be significant even if he did not land the top job.

Sunak’s story highlights how the halls of privilege have been remarkably open to the children of immigrants. Sunak followed the same path as many a duke’s heir, studying with the elite at Winchester College, then Oxford, then Stanford, then emerging from those rigours to work at Goldman Sachs. Then he made his money the old-fashioned British way, by marrying the daughter of a billionaire.

We have echoes of that in Canada. Three-term Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s family came to Canada from India, via Tanzania. He had a middle-class upbringing, but the doors of McKinsey were open to him upon graduation.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is more in the Sunak line, the son of privilege, whose wealthy parents sent him to an expensive private school in the United States. Like Sunak, Singh is often profiled for his bespoke wardrobe and other tokens of the luxury lifestyle.

While there are many stories of immigrants rising up from hardship, another measure of a country’s integration of immigrants is how quickly the path of privilege is opened to newcomers, as it was for Sunak and Singh.

Historic firsts are not always hardscrabble stories. Benjamin Disraeli — the first “ethnic” U.K. prime minister — was Jewish, but his family left the synagogue and he was baptized an Anglican as a boy. His brothers went to Winchester, as Sunak would eventually do.

Former U.S. president Barack Obama’s election was of immense significance for racial advancement, but he had a white middle-class upbringing. Raised by his white mother and grandparents after his Kenyan father abandoned the family, Obama then glided through the Ivy League, first at Columbia and then Harvard.

He was not the dirt poor descendant of slaves, left homeless as a child and taken in by his Black grandparents, at which point he was first introduced to indoor plumbing. That would be Clarence Thomas, who, for political reasons, is rarely celebrated as an emblem of Black uplift.

Sunak is a tale of immigrant privilege; his rise was relatively effortless, in comparison to the long slog of Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter. The Sunaks never need set foot in a grocery store if they choose not to.

There is another aspect of Sunak’s biography that is worthy of note — in my case, also for family reasons. His grandparents were part of a great migration of Indians to British Africa, as were mine. (Mohandas Gandhi himself went to South Africa.) Sunak’s grandparents went to Kenya, as did my maternal grandparents, and then his parents emigrated to Britain. My parents, after studying in England and Wales, came to Canada.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has a similar story. Her grandparents left India for Kenya and Mauritius, and then her parents emigrated to the U.K.

Now, given the relative lack of opportunities in Africa, most Indian families heading westward stop first in the Gulf states before landing in Europe or North America. Yet for nearly a century, the India-Africa-Commonwealth path was well trod, and Sunak is the apex of how successful it has been.

Omar Sachedina found himself in an awkward position in June. His CTV bosses were about to kick Lisa LaFlamme to the curb, and he would inherit the anchor’s chair. He must have intuited that it would be badly received, so after LaFlamme was told — but before it was made public — he took his mother back to Uganda to explore their family history and emphasize his diversity bona fides.

All week, CTV was heavily flogging Friday’s broadcast of the Sachedina home movie. It was crassly manipulative to tell the story in this way, on assignment in Uganda while LaFlamme had to keep mute about her firing. Nevertheless, the Sachedina family story belongs to the same arc as that of Sunak — and my own family.

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