Replaying an ugly racist history from almost exactly 100 years ago, anti-Indian bigotry has emerged an integral factor in the latest “white nationalist” surge in American politics,which returns the highly erratic convicted felon Donald Trump to the White House tomorrow. Back in 1924, after much hate-filled propaganda targeting Chinese, Japanese and Indians, the Johnson-Reed Act effectively banned immigration from all three countries for “posing a growing threat to American society and culture” alongside similarly undesirable Jews and Southern Europeans (whose numbers were cut 80%). Now the USA seems on the verge of something similar once again, with nasty prejudices about desis and others paraded in the open, and“large scale deportations” against the undocumented (including around a million Indians) potentially set to kick off next week itself.
In the wake of Kamala Harris’s failed attempt to succeed Joe Biden, in which the Vice President’s Tamil roots (via her late mother) featured prominently, and seemingly non-controversially, it is notable Trump’s “base” – an unwieldy coalition of racists joined with huge numbers of America’s working poor, that was catapulted to victory by an unscrupulous cabal of tech oligarchs led by Elon Musk – has already cleaved apart on the issue of Indians. This new politics of xenophobia has been accompanied by most fascinating fallouts: in the past few days alone, ultra-liberal senator Bernie Sanders and far-right extremist Steve Bannon have both attacked Musk over the H1-B visa programme (now basically a euphemism for “Indians”) which the rogue “richest man in the world” has declared he will “go to war” to defend. And, even more startlingly, despite his now-halting and humiliated mien, President Biden delivered an astonishing farewell indictment of where his country is heading (along with so many others, including ours), also transparently targeting Musk: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. [We] are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
H1B is an actual triviality, affecting only 85,000 people each year (for perspective, 90,415 illegal Indian immigrants were arrested on the US borders in 2024 alone). What is more, all those “techies” are fully legal, and playing by the rules the “Make America Great Again” crowds allegedly support. But now their mask has slipped. “It is a dirty secret that for all the rhetoric about illegal immigrants, there are very prominent figures in the Trump camp who want to limit legal immigration as well,” says Kishore Sharma, a senior economist based in New York, “Part of this is driven by economics. There is a view, even among skilled white-collar workers (including those of Indian descent) that they are being undercut in the labour market by equally skilled visa-seekers from India and China. This anxiety is understandable and should be viewed with some sympathy, since the US is driven by cut-throat capitalism, and corporate bosses who are ever eager for a stream of cheap skilled workers they can exploit. There however is another reason, based on race. The majority of legal immigrants are non-white, and there is a fear of demographic change, as espoused by Steve Bannon, who feels that the sense of community, or you could say social capital, is eroded by lack of a common underpinning culture.”
Sharma is an astute and balanced analyst of the world, who has lived in both the UK and USA for many years. Via email, he told me earlier this week that “I do not have a concern for my children as ‘Indian Americans’. There are Indian Americans in Trump’s cabinet and I do not see existing non-white citizens being targeted, there are too many of them and the power-holders in the Trump administration (Musk, Vance etc) do not have any specific ethnic axe to grind. However, I do have concerns for them as ‘American citizens’ especially given fears about a weakening of democratic institutions, lopsided and protectionist economic policies, increasing inequality/concentration of power in a wealthy few, and callous disregard for environmental and climate-related challenges.”
As with so many in Goa, the emergent ethno-nationalism of Trump and his ilk is personal to me, with relatives and friends scattered across the West, including my sole sibling Rohit Menezes, who lives in California atop an extensive career spanning corporate and non-profit sectors. When I reached out this week, he told me “I am surprised that it has taken this long for Indian Americans to be targeted by America’s white nationalists. Over my four decades in the US, the Indian American diaspora’s ascendance has been relentless and pervasive. Beyond corporate America and healthcare, Indian Americans have penetrated the highest echelons of many sectors ranging from entertainment to hospitality to politics (both sides of the aisle!) and civil society. It has been largely an unfettered romp. At the same time, since Indian Americans’ achievements have been uncoordinated and diffuse—reflecting the diversity of Indians and their varied immigration journeys, among other things - we have been hard to attack in a concentrated way. I see the attack in H1-B’s as one of the only tractable ways America’s white nationalists can target the community.”
My wise – albeit younger – brother concludes that “in the big picture, the model minority myth is a narrative subterfuge to suggest that achievement in America - social and economic mobility - is not determined by race. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Ironically, attacks on Indian Americans remind us that the myth is indeed a myth, and undermine the nativist argument for American exceptionalism when it comes to opportunity. From these attacks we are seeing that for some Americans, no matter how “successful” we Indian immigrants have been, or how much we contribute to America, we remain perpetually subordinate to a perceived white overclass.
To this subset of folks, we will never truly belong here. In this way, these attacks remind us that Indian-Americans are just like any other racial and ethnic minority in the US, and would do well to build solidarity with other similarly situated groups. When I read your question about the death of the Indian American dream, I hear “is this the end of Indian American’s journey towards being considered white?”
In my reading, despite our Satya Nadellas and Kamala Harrises, our integration into Whiteness was never in the near-term cards. I fear that for many white Americans, we have been designated as “forever foreigners” whose achievements are useful to obscure the innumerable anti-Black systems and policies that riddle America.”