Naushera Pannuan in Tarn Taran district has about 14,000 people and 8,000 voters. Roughly 2,000 are abroad, most having left in the last ten years.
In one patti of the village, Chaudhriwala, five men aged between 19 and 35 remain. They are the ones who either could not get a visa or whose applications are still being processed.
Twenty-five years ago one family in the village had a member abroad, in Hong Kong.
Families sell an acre or two to fund a departure. Named in reporting: Gurwinder Singh, 32; Dr Shivcharan Singh; and a former sarpanch, Iqbal Singh.
The route these men take is the one Punjabi calls the dunki: overland through Latin America, the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, then north through Central America and Mexico to the southern United States border. It takes months and people die on it every year.
The cost quoted in the villages runs to tens of lakhs per person, paid to agents in instalments, funded by selling or mortgaging land. A family that sells two acres to send a son has converted a permanent asset into a single attempt.
When a deportation flight lands at Amritsar, these are the villages the passengers go back to. The failure is public because the expenditure was public, and there is no rehabilitation programme of any kind.