A Nepali journalist recently asked me, 'UML leader KP Oli said that about 300 fake Bhutanese refugees are living a good life in America. What is the US government position on this?'

Simply put, there is no public position on this – and I know of no private positions that are salient. The FBI is not landing, to address another concern that has surfaced in the Nepali press. Not a single word has surfaced, because 300 people -- or 3,000 people -- is irrelevant compared to what goes on daily at our border.

Right now, there is a state of emergency in at least two states, the military has been deployed, and we're seeing 6-10,000 people per day cross over. The total yesterday (the 11th) was apparently 10,000. There were 29,000 in detention now before the emergency COVID legislation expired (illegally applied by the Trump administration, to be sure) and opened the flood gates. Mexico does nothing but serve as a transit corridor.

Time magazine notes:

We are seeing a level of migration not just at our southern border, but throughout the hemisphere, that is unprecedented,' Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said April 30 on NBC's Meet the Press. The administration's approach, he said, is to 'cut out the ruthless smugglers' and 'deliver lawful pathways so people can access humanitarian relief without having to take the dangerous journey from their home countries.

Nepal's investigation must be thus contextualized.

Nepali politicians are basically clueless about where they and Nepal fit into the world. Look at how hard the Maoists worked some years ago to pump up the cause of Venezuela. Are you kidding me? Venezuela is a humanitarian disaster on the order of Syria. More than 6 million Venezuelans have fled the country (as per the UN) and its 'Bolivarian' nightmare, a brutal Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. It is likely that more Venezuelans try to enter the US daily than the aggregate numbers of the Nepali scandal (and then some).

A place such as Venezuela just claims to be 'socialist' when it is, in reality, like others in Nepal's pantheon of supposed friends and models, but a loathsome authoritarian dystopia. China can leverage size and history (with a healthy dose of global cheating thrown in) to deliver economic progress, but at the bottom the population is locked into the same downside as the masses of Venezuela – or Nepal.

For the record, Caracas right now is involved in a scandal that makes anything Nepal has ever thought of pale by comparison.The fees being charged in 'the scandal,' in fact, thenare basically in the ballpark that my own research finds Maoist illicit fundraising demanding now in their local extortion. Rupees 1 million is normal, with demands as high as Rs 2 million recorded. The fees cited in the Lhoksampa scam would thus seem something of a bargain.

Scale is everything when figuring who is paying attention to what.

Any decent size US company has profits annually that rival Nepal's GDP. Disney's gross profit last year, for instance, was $28 billion, while Nepal's entire GDP was listed at $39 billion. This pales next to the $202 billion Disney's assets are worth. Nepal's scam just doesn't register in the American consciousness next to something like the fight picked with Disney by the Florida governor (another would-be dictator, but that's a different subject).

Mr. Oli's comment concerning the 'good life' ostensibly being lived by those who ostensibly gotten to the US (double hearsay) also needs to be contextualized.

The 'good life' in America for Nepalis who have gotten here 'the hard way' (average transit time is 3 months of experiences much like the U.S. Army's strenuous Ranger School qualification course (which takes about the same time). Graduation for Ranger is weeks of survival in the swamps of Florida. For Nepalis moving painfully to to the U.S. illicitly, it's in the tortuous, dangerous Darien Gap.

Once here, most, as best my research can discern, scrape by on a pittance. The average looks to be, based on available documentation, about $8-16,000 per year in total earnings. That buys little. The median U.S. household income (and about 60% of both parents work in U.S. families) is $70,000 as per a quick Google search. Aquarter to a third is paid to taxes, and homelessness nationwide has reached levels not seen in a very long timesimply because housing has in many areas become unaffordable.

It thus matters greatly that adding up all Nepalis who have come here produces hardly a drop in a very large bucket, either compared to those we see trying to enter on a daily, certainly weekly, basis or in aggregate. This is a country of 330 million -- third behind India and China – and also third in physical size. Anyone who comes can find work; it's just what type of work.

Google says that in 2020 there were 208,000 Nepalis. It also says that in 2010 there were 59,000. That raises the possibility that either (1) Nepalis have big families (who knows?) or (2) many more have made their way here than counted. No available figures, formal or informal, dealing with licit or illicit entry, provide a basis for more than speculation. At the end of the day, most Americans have never met a Nepali, much less worried about how they came here.

For comparison, one might consider the prominence in the popular mind of the Tibetan refugee issue. The issue is only known at all due to the respect for the Dalai Lama. In reality, there are just some 150,000 Tibetans in the entire world outside Tibet. Most are in India; the second largest population is in Nepal, where, as per serious sources, they are treated poorly (see e.g. the U.S. State Department in a 2021 report but more prominently, the 100-page Human Rights Watch Report of 2014). There are only 8,000 in the US. Eight thousand of 330 million. Most Americans have never even met a Tibetan. Ironically, despite their comparatively larger numbers, the same is true where Nepalis are concerned. And they don't have a Dalai Lama figure as a signpost.

So why do Nepalis come?

Because this is a country built on hope. It may be more dangerous than Nepal, in one sense, but it is ideally suited to the Nepali psychology, which might be put thus: 'If I keep my head down and work, I can progress, make it .' Political violence here remains low -- the place, for all its looniness, is remarkably stable.

And you really can go from nothing to something. It just takes time, perseverance – and luck. Advance through immigrationis often seen in the children. Evidence appears to show that parents normally have given up everything to position themselves so that their children could be the ones to know success. I suspect it works that way for Nepalis, as well.

What is discussed in the press here, to an extent, but not in political circles – where what goes on would convince Nepalis things are really not so bad at home – is just how desperate much of the world has become due to the combination of socio-economic need, political repression, and both state and non-state actor violence. Illicit entries into the U.S. are dominated, according to U.S. statistics, by the Northern Triangle disaster (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), where misguided U.S. policies have been central to unleashing the 'push' dynamic, together with Mexico, India, and China, the latter three all authoritarian and each a growing disaster in its own right.

Nepal only appears good by comparison to these cases because analyses rarely look beneath the surface. In particular, they do not grapple with continuing local political violence. When you're on the receiving end of violence, with nowhere to turn, flight is the option. Police, under longstanding orders not to involve themselves in matters 'political,' are useless.

It is this dynamic which drives most illicit movement of Nepalis to the United States. The high-end scam presently dominates the news only because it is just that, a matter of big names and positions. In reality, the numbers, whether money or victims, pale next to what goes on routinely, driven nearly exclusively by cadre claiming to represent the very party for whom the scandal poses the greatest challenge – and threat.

Dr. Thomas is a Political Risk Consultant from Honolulu, Hawaii, USA