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Vivek’s fate a cautionary tale for Indian Americans in ‘brave, new’ xenophobic MAGA world – Firstpost

Vivek’s fate a cautionary tale for Indian Americans in ‘brave, new’ xenophobic MAGA world – Firstpost



The return of Donald Trump to the White House is an epochal moment, the true import of which may not lend itself to contemporaneous assessment. Trump is history’s ‘reset’ button, challenging our priors, reshuffling our rules, orders, moral sensibilities and rewriting our edicts. When he demits office, nothing will be the same.

In this piece I shall explore a topic specific to Trump’s second coming. The MAGA movement, a reactionary force against what
Mary Harrington calls the “rule by a headless, faceless and monolithically ideologically aligned swarm”, is characterised as much by nativism as a populist revolt against immigration, globalization and multiculturalism. It is in one respect a working-class insurgency against its perceived economic disenfranchisement by the elites, and in another a revanchist rebellion laced with anxiety over white America’s racial identity.

This concurrence of motivations places the MAGA movement at odds with Indian-Americans, a 5.2 million-strong community, the second-largest immigrant group in the US that account for
20% of the nation’s Asian American population, and is the most educated and affluent ethnic group in the United States.

Assessing the tension between a dominant and xenophobic political group that has just helped put its totem back into the world’s most powerful office, and the most successful immigrant community in a country that has a history of bigotry and hostility against immigrants of colour, specifically those of Asian origin, is necessary because Indian Americans are increasingly becoming more politically aware and ambitious.

Among the members of US Congress, right now five are of Indian descent. Around 40 Indian Americans have entered state legislatures. New York Times points out, quoting AAPI Data – an organization that collects information about Asian Americans – that it is the highest number of any Asian origin group in the US. More and more Indian Americans are eager to join the political mainstream.

This assessment of the intra-group tension, and consequently the future of the Indian Americans in America, could be messy, complicated and resistant to neat binaries.

For instance, though Indian Americans have in the past leant heavily Democratic, the Democratic Party of late has been bleeding support. Most of the defectors are identifying as ‘independents’, while some have gravitated towards Trump’s Republican Party owing to the GoP’s focus on social issues such as education, family values and immigration.

The 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey (IAAS) by Carnegie, ahead of the November presidential polls, found that 47% respondents identify as ‘Democrats’ among this community, down from 56% in 2020 – and a modest gain in favour of Trump. And yet, while the Indian Americans are showing greater engagement as political actors and are even willing to give the party that has been historically perceived as ‘anti-immigrant’ and ‘intolerant’ of faiths other than Christianity a try, the core MAGA base has not warmed up to Indian Americans.

This perceived shift in the community’s attitude and trajectory has not found reciprocation. In fact, a series of developments since Trump’s return to the White House indicate that that the success of Indian Americans as an immigrant community, its certain cultural attributes and growing political ambition is sparking a nativist backlash from Trump’s white Christian base.

The Indian Americans may be more willing to embrace a conservative zeitgeist, and indeed Trump’s resounding victory wouldn’t have been possible without a sizeable Latino and Asian defection in his favour, but to the MAGA base, the immigrant community’s ‘paganism’ and brown skin evoke suspicion and derision, while its success breeds a deep resentment.

All Indian immigrants’ assimilation efforts break down at bigotry’s door as the rightists aim for an ethnical purification of a country that has been built by immigrants. The unfolding of this friction has been fascinating to watch, not least the Indian American community’s determination not to play the victim despite being at the receiving end of vicious racism from MAGA activists and far-right trolls.

This racism is based primarily on the glorification of the white races.

Consider the fact America has a First Lady who emigrated to the US from Slovenia (then a part of Yugoslavia) in 1996 and made a career in fashion modelling. Ahead of the first Trump term, tabloids across the world splashed nude images of a young Melania Knauss wearing little else than sporting a pair of handcuffs or a chrome pistol. The reproduction of the racy images drew general condemnation and never became an issue for Trump’s twin marches to the White House.

Consider also the fact that Usha Vance, born in a suburb of San Diego County, California, to Indian immigrant parents, became the first Asian American and Hindu American to become Second Lady of the US when JD Vance took oath as the vice-president.

Where both of these very American success stories depart is the uneven treatment both ladies have been subjected to. While
Melania, the
Slavic goddess is an embodiment of grace and beauty typical of the white ‘master race’, Usha, the America-born high-achiever and an accomplished lawyer, has been at the centre of vile attacks steeped in racism and bigotry.
Leave alone right-wing anonymous accounts that wonder about “whether there will be a cow in the White House” when the “stinky Indian” steps in, widely followed right-wing accounts, white nationalist ‘groypers’ blasted Vance for marrying a non-Christian, non-white woman. “What kind of man marries somebody that isn’t a Christian? What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity, his heritage. Clearly, he doesn’t value his religion. He doesn’t marry a woman that professes Jesus Christ? What does that say about him?”

This is not a fringe backlash. The MAGA movement’s activism against illegal immigration has morphed into a fierce opposition to even high-skilled legal immigration – where Indians have overwhelmingly been at the receiving end. Once again, we find that racial anxiety has been window-dressed as economic concern, and a version of ‘great displacement theory’ has been put forward centred around a perceived notion that ‘Indians are out to steal American jobs’.

A manifestation of this right-wing pushback against Indian immigration is found in the ongoing debates around H1B visa, Trump’s attempted denial of birthright citizenship – an executive order that shakes the very foundation of America’s Constitution – and the heat faced by the likes of Sriram Krishnan and Vivek Ramaswamy. Krishnan, the Indian American entrepreneur appointed by Trump as senior policy advisor on AI, has been taken to the cleaners by major right-wing accounts for championing skilled immigration, especially through the H1B programme.

Before we move on to the case of Vivek, that exemplifies the challenges faces by the Indian American community in achieving its political ambitions, it is worth testing the veracity of the claim that the temporary, non-immigrant H1B visa programme, through which companies hire highly skilled foreign workers for specific roles, are displacing Americans at lower wages owing to their obedience, lack of agency, and willingness to work more for less.

In his
blog, Noah Smith shares data and findings from various scholarly papers to show that “when national H-1b numbers were restricted, employment for similar native-born workers didn’t rise”; that “companies who won the H-1b lottery didn’t hire fewer ‘H-1b-like’ native-born workers” and were scaling up without generating large amounts of substitution; that greater employment of skilled immigrant workers also leads to
employment expansion for young natives and “increases in STEM workers are associated with significant wage gains for college-educated natives”.

It has also been established that instead of foreign workers acting as deep-discounted labourers for American firms, “controlling for their human capital attributes, foreign IT professionals (those without U.S. citizenship and those with H-1B or other work visas) earn a salary premium when compared with IT professionals with U.S. citizenship,” according to a
paper by Sunil Mithas and Henry C. Lucas, Jr.

An article in Indian Express published by
researchers Ritam Chaurey of Johns Hopkins University, Kanika Mahajan of Ashoka University and Shekhar Tomar of Indian School of Business points out “that job postings for US-based positions dropped by 15 per cent almost immediately after Trump’s primary win”.

“Simultaneously, it led to a significant rise in India-based job postings by firms most affected by the uncertainty. We find that firms with a 10-percentage point higher reliance on H-1B workers increased India-based postings by 11 per cent. For an average firm posting ads for US-based positions, this translated to 16 additional India-based positions and four fewer US-based ones. This highlights how immigration policy uncertainty can quickly reshape global hiring patterns.”

In other words, the controversy around H1B and other temporary work visas for highly skilled workers in the US is proving to be beneficial for countries such as India because US-based firms are relocating positions originally based in the US. So, the MAGA movement’s crusade is not based on economic merit.

An understanding of this dynamic is important because it clearly shows that MAGA activists’ hatred against high-skilled immigrants – most of whom are Indians – and the political campaign to deny immigrants the chance to have a child who is an American citizen (once again that may adversely impact legal immigration) is an exhibition of racial prejudice against Indians, instead of an activism to reverse the economic disenfranchisement.

Faced with a civil war at home, Trump, who understands the importance of allowing highly skilled workers into the US, has been equivocating on the topic, reluctant to anger any of the two key constituents of the recent MAGA coalition who are split down the middle over the issue. This gives the US president the space to placate his right-wing base, while also not angering Silicon Valley tech leaders such as Elon Musk – a key figure in Trump 2.0 administration – for whom H1B is an invaluable route to get the world’s top talent.

The case of Vivek is most interesting, and by some measure, most unfortunate. His sidelining from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – ironically his brainchild and borne out of Vivek’s determined crusade for a ‘small government’ – has been attributed to a number of factors, including his fallout with co-leader and tech tycoon Musk, Trump’s right-hand man.

While that is in the realm of speculation, media reports indicate that Vivek’s fallout was a consequence of an ill-fated post on X (formerly Twitter) on December 26 at the height of the raging controversy over H1B visas where he claimed that “the reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…”

I have reproduced only
part of the post that has gone viral.

The post, that took aim at the lapse in American culture from excellence to a celebration of mediocrity, created a maelstrom of white racist anger against Vivek in particular, that metastasized to hatred against Indians in general. Interestingly, while the MAGA base has been very angry because they claim Vivek called them ‘lazy, unambitious and pedestrian’, many Indian Americans as well as some voices in India have called the post an act of stupidity since it angers the core base of a populist movement.

I posit that it is a thorough misinterpretation of Vivek’s message. I hold no brief for one of the most successful Indian Americans who needs no defending and may well resurrect his political career as the governor of Ohio, but it is instructive how his call for a version of America that Vivek believes the current generation should aim to emulate, has been turned on its head as a ‘hate speech’.

Vivek’s language may have been a little harsh, but the substance of his message – that the current generation of white Americans are embracing mediocrity and anti-intellectualism, and that nerds are to be valued, not made into subjects of ridicule and scorn –is nothing new. It has been made by white authors in the past without a fraction of
racist backlash that Vivek has been subjected to.

His appeal, that ‘othering’ or talking down Asian immigrants and their academic achievements is self-defeating may have been the result of some traumatic experiences from
his childhood but that in no way takes away from the veracity of the argument. If anything, on the limited point about the need to import best talent into America, his words were a lot less harsh than Musk’s.

Vivek has not denigrated Americans or their culture. He stresses on striving for excellence minus the distractions to put Americans on top. That’s patriotism. Going by the fact that the Indian community in the US is the most educated and wealthiest, he clearly has a point. To exhort fellow countrymen to follow the example of the leading pack becomes ‘denigration’ only if you put the colour of the skin of the person or the group ahead of the argument and decide that Vivek has grown larger than his brown boots.

In a 2023
interview, Vivek had said “that he does not identify as an Indian American. Being Hindu and Indian is ‘part of my cultural identity, for sure, and I’m proud of that and very comfortable with that,’ he said after a campaign stop in Marshalltown, Iowa. ‘But I’m an American first’.”

And therein lies the problem. Vivek tried to adopt the white persona and issue sermons as whites do, oblivious of the fact that he was demolishing established permission structures and overstepping boundaries. This power structure has been internalized to such an extent that its reversal is objectionable even to Indians sitting in India.

It did not matter that Vivek was one of the most sparkling protagonists of the MAGA movement, decimating rivals during the first Republican primary debate, taking to cleaners the most vicious narrative peddlers from the Left and legacy media while defending Trump, providing intellectual ballast to the movement, or sleekly defending some of the white nativism.

Throwing his lot in a party of white Christian evangelists and nationalists, Vivek even tried to retrofit Hinduism as some sort of an equivalent to Judeo-Christianity to make it more palatable to Trump’s base who see it as ‘paganism’ or ‘demon worshipping’. It didn’t matter. The brown skin talking down to MAGA generates a different kind of animus. The racist filth that came his way has an overarching theme – that Vivek is a charlatan who has been finally found out.

Data shows that Indian Americans, majority of whom are Hindus, have been at the receiving end of discrimination in America, including violence and prejudice.

An online survey conducted by YouGov in September 2020, involving 1200 adult, resident Indian Americans, the result of which was published in Washington Post, reveals that “31% of Indian Americans believe that discrimination against people of Indian origin is a major problem in the US— while 53% think it’s a minor problem. Measuring respondents’ lived experiences with discrimination reveals that 1 in 2 Indian Americans reports being subjected to some form of discrimination over the previous 12 months.”

The
survey also finds that while “Indian Americans enjoy a higher level of professional and financial success relative to many other immigrant communities in the country. But these successes have not inoculated them from the forces of discrimination.”

Vivek’s fate is in some ways a cautionary tale for Indian Americans, some of whom have had to adopt Christian identities to get ahead in politics, such as Bobby Jindal or Nikki Haley. Vivek didn’t abandon his Hindu identity, and in the vortex of the raging cultural battle over identity, became an overnight ‘snake oil peddler’ in MAGA eyes.

It is a tough situation for the community that is deemed to be ‘white adjacent’ by the Hinduphobic Left that uses tools such as ‘caste discrimination’ to discriminate against Hindu Americans. And they evoke suspicion, resentment and hatred in the ‘brave, new America’ ruled by MAGA.

Trump, who has incorporated a number of Indian Americans in key roles in his administration, is a pragmatist but if faced with a dilemma, won’t be defying his core base for the immigrant community. We already see shades of this challenge. Vivek’s fate, the racist attacks on Usha, Trump’s move on birthright citizenship explicitly target the most successful immigrant community in the US, one that stays away from crime, contributes to American nation-building, leads Silicon Valley and future skills and is increasingly looking for political agency top go with their material success.

America, being the land of opportunities, offers this skillful, hardworking community the chance for economic success but when it comes to political power, they must keep on the narrow lane or suffer consequences.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.





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