Immigration to Bhutan
[2] The third wave of human migration was that of Nepalis and Indians as craftsmen, migrant workers, and slaves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[4] The Act was pronounced by the Druk Gyalpo King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck among a series of legal and social reforms in 1958 designed to begin modernizing Bhutan, including the abolition of slavery.
[6] The 1958 Act defined Bhutanese citizenship in patrilineal terms, and provided a basic framework for the process of naturalization in Bhutan.
Initially, applicants other than wives of Bhutanese citizens were required to show a ten-year residency, five years of service to the government, and ownership of agricultural land.
Placement by government workers into census registry categories, which ranged from "Genuine Bhutanese" to "Non-nationals: Migrants and Illegal Settlers," has been arbitrary, and could be arbitrarily changed.
They have also assimilated into the dominant Tibetan-Ngalop culture to varying degrees, one of the foremost concerns of modern Bhutanese immigration policy.
Before Tibetans settled Bhutan, much of the region was populated by the aboriginal Monpa who practiced the shamanistic Bön religion.
[1] Earliest records to the area which the Monpas inhabited today indicated the existence of a kingdom known as Monyul or Lhomon from 500 BC to 600 AD.
[14] In the seventeenth century, a Tibetan expatriate Drukpa monk, Ngawang Namgyal established a theocratic government independent of political influence from Tibet proper, and premodern Bhutan emerged.
Ngawang Namgyal arrived in Bhutan in 1616 seeking refuge from the domination of the Gelugpa sect led by the Dalai Lama in Lhasa.
In the 1634 Battle of Five Lamas, Ngawang Namgyal prevailed over the Tibetan and Bhutanese forces allied against him and was the first to unite Bhutan into a single country.
He promulgated a code of law, the Tsa Yig, and built a network of impregnable dzongs, a system that helped bring local lords under centralized control and strengthened the country against Tibetan invasions.
Today, the term Ngalop refers to those Bhutanese of ancient Tibetan descent who came to dominate Bhutan culturally and politically.
The first reports of people of Nepalese origin in Bhutan was around 1620, when Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal commissioned Newar craftsmen from the Kathmandu valley in Nepal to make a silver stupa to contain the ashes of his father Tempa Nima.
The Newar are an ethnic group distinct from the Bahuns, Tamangs, Gurungs, Rais that form the Lhotsampa community.
[16] The next small groups of Nepalese emigrated primarily from eastern Nepal under British Indian auspices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[2][3] Members of many ethnic groups, including forefathers of Lhotshampa[4] and others from Sikkim, the Assam Duars, and West Bengal, were brought into Bhutan as slaves (the institution was abolished in 1958).
In the 1940s, the British Political Officer Sir Basil Gould was quoted as saying that when he warned Sir Raja Sonam Topgay Dorji of Bhutan House of the potential danger of allowing so many ethnic Nepalese to settle in southern Bhutan, he replied that "since they were not registered subjects they could be evicted whenever the need arose.
[4]: 30 [23]: 160–162 The beginning of Nepalese immigration largely coincided with Bhutan's political development: in 1885, Druk Gyalpo Ugyen Wangchuck consolidated power after a period of civil unrest and cultivated closer ties with the British in India.
[6] The Tibetan refugees were fleeing famine, uprising, suppression, and persecution during Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.
Like the prior Nepalese immigrants, they came to be called Lhotshampa, blurring the line between citizens, legal residents, and persons illegally present.
[4] From 1961 onward, with Indian support, the government began planned developmental activities consisting of significant infrastructure projects.
In 1990, violent ethnic unrest and anti-government protests occurred in southern Bhutan, pressing for greater democracy and respect for minority rights.
[6] That year, the Bhutan Peoples' Party, whose members are mostly Lhotshampa, began a campaign of violence against the Bhutanese government.
