In 1965, American President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act which overturned the Johnson-Reed or Immigration Act of 1924. The new legislation brought to an end the existence of racial quotas, as well as the exclusion of Asians in the US.
One of the principal beneficiaries of this new legislation were middle-class, well-educated Indians. They moved to the US in droves and swiftly assimilated themselves into American society. There had, of course, been an exodus of Sikhs from India to California’s Central Valley in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were extremely industrious and worked as farmers while confronting widespread racial animus.
Over time, subsequent generations of Sikhs became prosperous and even made a mark in national politics. Dalip Singh Saund, who had migrated from Punjab, had worked as a farmer, and later educated at the University of California, Berkeley. He became the first Indian-American to serve in the US House of Representatives. His tenure in office lasted from 1957 to 1963.
The Rise of a Model Minority
Today, Indian-Americans and their progeny amount to about five million of the population of the US. Despite being 1.6 percent of the population, they pay close to six percent of the country’s taxes. This figure, however, should not be entirely surprising. A disproportionate number of them are professionals including doctors, university professors, engineers and journalists.
It is also worth noting that there are as many as six Indian-Americans in the US House of Representatives. And, of course, Kamala Harris, was a US Senator from California prior to her unsuccessful bid for the presidency after also serving as President Joe Biden’s Vice President.
Given the overall success of the community, many political commentators had lauded Indian-Americans as the “model minority”: one that worked hard, educated their children, and contributed much to American life and society. This image, while mostly warranted, did overlook a segment of the community that was not prosperous and was mostly mired in low-paying, blue-collar jobs.
Backlash and the Politics of Resentment
Despite their largely well-deserved reputation as model immigrants the community is facing a growing backlash in parts of the United States today.
The reasons for this hostility are complex. In large part, they can be attributed to the changing overall demographics of the United States. That factor, alone, is only part of the explanation. The growth of an increasingly foreign-born or foreign origin population has proven to be quite unsettling to some segments of the America’s population.
The unease is mostly, though not exclusively, confined to America’s non-college educated, white, working-class population. Over the last several decades, they have witnessed minor but visible gains on the part of America’s African-American and Hispanic populations.
Simultaneously, they have also faced significant job losses, especially in traditional industrial sectors, as many of these jobs were shipped out to middle-income countries. These developments have, quite unsurprisingly, contributed an understandable sense of social and economic insecurity.
Instead of addressing the underlying causes of this discontent, politicians across the country have chosen to deflect the sources of the troubles of the aggrieved populace elsewhere. They have, to that end, directed the frustration and ire of the dislocated and insecure to imaginary causes.
Amongst other matters, despite the existence of much economic evidence to the contrary they have asserted that foreign workers are taking low-wage jobs from native-born Americans. The irony, of course, is that most of these jobs are poorly paid, have long working hours and are frequently back-breaking. Consequently, few of them would accept these jobs anyway.
Nevertheless, since the second presidential term of Donald Trump the fears of undocumented immigrants taking menial jobs for low wages has become a staple of political discourse.
Old Ghosts: Racism, Xenophobia and Historical Echoes
Given that the vast majority of Indian-Americans do not fall into the category of low-skilled workers, why have they become the targets of xenophobes in the US?
The hostility that has emerged toward immigrants in general and Indian-Americans in particular, bluntly stated, is tapping into two latent elements that are deeply embedded in American political culture: racism and xenophobia.
The first, of course, has a long and tragic history in the US. Its lineage can be traced to the horrors of slavery, and need not be recounted here. The progress on ending racism, both societal and institutional, has been fitful. Nevertheless, tangible progress has been made on that front. In a most ironic twist, those advances, in turn, have generated hostility as those who enjoyed racial privilege have seen their status erode.
Xenophobia also has a long history in the US. The phenomenon, of course, is bizarre given that the US is a land of immigrants barring the hapless indigenous population and African-Americans, the descendants of the legacy of slavery.
Nevertheless, as any sociologist or historian of America can attest, xenophobia has emerged in all its ugliness, at a time of dramatic social or economic disruption. For example, in the 1850s, a movement known as the Know-Nothings, arose. This anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant force emerged because of the influx of German and Irish immigration. The Irish were fleeing the potato famine and the Germans political unrest.
What one is witnessing today is a throwback to that era. In a time of economic upheaval and uncertainty, anti-immigrant sentiment in the form of xenophobia is again coming to the fore.
Sadly, only a handful of national political figures have adopted an unequivocal stance in condemning this most pernicious trend. Instead, for fear of alienating key voting constituencies, they have mostly sidestepped the issue.
Envy of Success
Finally, why is this xenophobic wrath now being directed toward well-to-do sections of the Indian-American community? It is all part and parcel of the politics of resentment.
For example, seeing an Indian-American who professes the Sikh faith, Ajay Banga, as the head of an iconic American firm, Mastercard (and now heading the World Bank) is galling to some parochial Americans who resent the meteoric rise of a person of colour to such high places.
A similar set of sentiments probably also gets under their skin when they see that the CEO of another quintessentially American firm, Google, is an Indian-American, Sundar Pichai. The fact that he rose to that position from humble roots in India through the sheer dint of merit and hard work, celebrated American ideals, is of little consequence to bigots and xenophobes.
Given the extraordinary contributions of the Indian-American community to places high and low, one can only hope that these resentments and grievances, which some politicians in high places have fanned and nurtured for reasons of electoral expediency, are only a passing phenomenon. Sustaining them, far from making America great again, will contribute to American decline.
The US, a land long built upon immigrant enterprise, risks alienating and losing some of its most formidable sources of talent and drive.
(Sumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)