December, 2015
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom in the clouds so remote that its giant neighbors didn’t even know it existed. Situated at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountain Range, it was called High Land by the men and women who lived there. For more than 1,000 years, the kings and their citizens practiced their Buddhist faith and honored their native Tibetan culture.
Then one day, the king invited Hindu craftsmen from the neighboring country, Nepal, to do important jobs – from smithing silver to clearing forests to building roads. These craftsmen brought their families to the kingdom, along with their traditional culture, language, food and clothing. With ample work and plentiful food, these Nepali families stayed and began farming the lush valleys and plains in the kingdom’s southern lands. Their numbers increased as new generations grew up supplying the kingdom with food.
For generations, the kingdom flourished, with the Tibetan Buddhist culture ruling from the north and the Nepali Hindu culture feeding everyone from the south. As time passed, people from India came into the kingdom to work and raise families, too. Though the rulers offered money to those who married into the ruling culture, the Nepali and Indians held fast to their traditional languages and way of life.
Then, the government passed a package of laws called “One Nation, One People,” designed to force uniformity. One law fined citizens if they appeared in public wearing anything other than northern people’s traditional dress. Another law discontinued the use of the Nepali language in the kingdom’s schools, requiring all teaching and learning to take place in Dzongkha, the governing language.
You might have already guessed that this is no fairy tale. The kingdom of the High Land is Bhutan, a little nation in southern Asia with a big immigration issue. After thousands of years of separating residents by their original nationalities, Bhutan’s ruling class decided its population needed to be like them. In 1988, the country conducted its first census to establish citizenship. Those who could prove they had lived in Bhutan prior to 1958 were granted citizenship papers. Anyone who could not prove residence before 1958 was considered an illegal immigrant.
