No one should be that surprised India has chosen to permit United States military flights to return illegal immigrants. The decision followed swiftly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first meeting with any foreign official, that with India’s foreign minister.   

Progressives, who regularly denounce Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a religious fundamentalist strongman, may cast the evident alliance with the Trump administration as evidence that he is a populist authoritarian. But time spent in the world’s most populous nation tells a different story: Call it the un-China, the democratic contrast to the People’s Republic of China—which is far from likely to take back its own thousands of illegal immigrants who’ve been sneaking across the Mexico border.