How Foolish Is It For Successful Indian-Americans To Support the Republican Party?

They May Find Out Soon Enough

By my senior year in college, all my professors were friends/customers. I didn’t have to wait around to officially graduate. A couple months before that, I left the country and drove to India and spent nearly 2 years driving around the subcontinent, from the Punjab into Delhi, down to Bombay (now Mumbai) to Goa, where I rented a house on the beach for a few months, through Kerala, over to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then up the east coast to Madras (now Chennai) and then Calcutta (now Kolkata). I drove to Nepal and the recently paved road to Kathmandu. There were nearly no cars anywhere, trucks, yes; also buses but, outside Delhi and Bombay, I would drive for a full day and never see another private car. People weren’t going anywhere that they couldn’t be pulled to in a rickshaw. My impression: I was in a very primitive party of the world.

Once I started working at Warner Bros, almost two decades later, I was eager to visit India again, “on business,” although the belief in India being a real market or as a place to find talent for the western market was somewhat illusory. I went back many times over the years, both on business and for well… vacations you could call it. And India changed— from, for example, no cars to now around 100 million cars. Delhi is car congestion hell, as bad as L.A.

However, it's important to note that despite the growth in private car ownership, the overall vehicle ownership rate in India remains relatively low compared to global standards. In rural areas, car ownership is around 4%, translating to about 8 million households, while urban areas have approximately 15 million households owning cars. So, while there has been substantial growth in car ownership since my first trip there, a large segment of the population still relies on alternative modes of transportation.

This car thing is symbolic in my mind of two nations in one country— what some people call “India” and “Bharat.” You can be walking along in central Delhi ad you see well dressed, well-fed prosperous people people who look like they’d fit right in in any non-MAGA community in America. And right on the same sidewalk, you see another world— smaller, darker displaced rural people not part of the consumer economy. “India” is the modern, urban and globalized middle and upper classes concentrated in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. They’re completely connected to the technological, financial, and cultural currents of the Western world. They benefit from education, global mobility, and access to modern infrastructure. “Bharat” represents the rural, agrarian, impoverished India, where traditional ways of life persist, and economic opportunities are scarce. This India also spills into urban centers in the form of slums and informal labor economies, highlighting the rural-urban migration driven by poverty. I noteiced that though these two Indias occupy the same physical space, they often don’t interact at all.

At play here is the caste system, which today translates into better nutrition, health and physical growth over generations. Meanwhile, Dalits and Adivasis (tribal groups) have faced centuries of discrimination and deprivation, leading to shorter stature and poorer health outcomes. Malnutrition exacerbates height and health disparities, while better nutrition and healthcare among the wealthy reinforce their physical advantages. This divide is more than aesthetic; it reflects systemic inequality. Although the U.S. appears to be headed in this direction, even smaller percentage of Indians control the majority of wealth. India's top 1% own over 40% of national wealth, while the bottom 50% own less than 10%. Elite schools and universities cater to urban, affluent families, leaving rural children stuck in underfunded public schools. And, s you can no doubt guess, urban hospitals rival Western standards, but rural areas usually lack even basic clinics.

These divides often play out politically. The rising middle class seeks modernization and global integration, while rural populations prioritize traditional values, religion, and ugly, caste-based identity politics. India’s MAGA party, Modi’s BJP, has leveraged rural and lower-middle-class anxieties to consolidate power.

The migration of rural Indians into urban centers has created “slum belts” around major cities, where stark contrasts between wealth and poverty are most visible. Yet, these migrant workers form the backbone of India’s informal economy, building the skyscrapers and malls that symbolize prosperity.

This split doesn’t just reflect economic inequality— it mirrors centuries of historical, cultural, and social fragmentation. India is both an IT superpower and a country struggling with poverty, illiteracy, and malnutrition. The sometimes eerie coexistence of these two worlds— when you run across it on the streets of Delhi, for example, can be disquieting.

When I was a kid, growing up on Long Island and in Brooklyn, there was Chinese food— but no Thai, Japanese, Korean or Indian food that I ever came across. Today, Indian food is something I eat— and cook— regularly. Indian music was not something most American ears could handle— though that didn’t stop me from booking Indian musicians like Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Bismillah Khan at my college and playing their music on my radio shows. To this day, the music of the Ali Brothers is something I can never get enough of. How do you think this would go over among the people who tune into Steve Bannon’s or Joe Rogan’s podcasts? 

This morning, Noah Smith took a look at how the MAGAts see migration from India. He discovered— and shared— that the MAGAts are fighting with each other over their xenophobic reaction to successful, high-performance migrants from India, which exploded when Musk had Señor T appoint Sriram Krishnan, a former Twitter exec and Andreessen Horowitz partner, to be a senior AI policy advisor. Krishnan has been a vocal supporter of skilled immigration. MAGAts flipped out and out came their xenophobic soap boxes, ironically, on Twitter. This is being noticed in India, of course. Proud racist, Laura Loomer, for one, went bonkers, with a prolonged Twitter attack against Krishnan and Ro Khanna, even threatening to stay away from the polls in 2026. Like this:

and this:

MAGAt Charles Haywood was more succinct in his racist tweet: “America for the Americans. Everyone else, GTFO (“get the fuck out”). More irony: Musk has Twitter’s algorithm system fixed so that over 330,000 were fed Haywood’s tweet. Musk himself, as well as his people, “gamely stood up for Krishnan and for the idea of high-skilled immigration in general. A tremendous fracas ensued on Twitter, which has basically become the in-house conversation room for the American right. Far-right trolls (including the pathetic but persistent “groypers”) jumped in to attack Indians as a group, and Indians jumped in to defend themselves. Meanwhile, more intellectual discussion shifted to the H-1b visa, which— though not the same as the green card issue that Sriram was talking about— has become a focal point of right-wing pushback against high-skilled immigration. The debates over high-skilled immigration, Indian immigration specifically, and programs like H-1b are closely related— increasingly so, in fact. Most H-1b workers are Indian,and Indians make up a plurality of foreign-born STEM workers. Indian workers have become far more important than Chinese workers to America’s strategic high-tech industries:

And although Indians are now the second biggest group of foreign-born residents in America (behind Mexicans, of course), they are also the most successful by many measures— their median household income far exceeds that of any other group. And Indian Americans are now influential well beyond STEM and the tech world — for example, in politics. Kash Patel has been nominated to head the FBI, and Vivek Ramaswamy is helping to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency. Even Vice President JD Vance’s wife is Indian! Although Indian Americans still lean a bit toward the Democrats on average, they’re becoming more evenly split between the parties— there are a substantial number of Indians on the right now [just like in Modi’s India] despite the presence of another faction of the right that doesn’t particularly like Indians. So the debate over skilled immigration is actually just part of a broader debate about the fast-growing role of Indian and Indian-American people in the U.S. elite. But first, let’s talk about skilled immigration on its own merits.

First, let’s point out that skilled immigration overall is very important and good for America. Elon Musk is right when he says “If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will lose.”

…In fact, the American people pretty strongly agree. A recent Pew poll found that an overwhelming majority of Americans place a priority on letting in highly skilled workers:

…H-1b workers could actually be reinforcing America’s overall advantage as the place where high-tech companies want to invest. This increased investment naturally benefits native-born tech workers as well.

In fact, there is some evidence for this theory. Glennon (2023) shows that when companies are prevented from hiring H-1b workers, they start investing in other countries instead:

How do multinational firms respond when artificial constraints, namely policies restricting skilled immigration, are placed on their ability to hire scarce human capital?…[F]irms respond to restrictions on H-1B immigration by increasing foreign affiliate employment…particularly in China, India, and Canada. The most impacted jobs were R&D-intensive ones…[F]or every visa rejection, [multinational companies] hire 0.4 employees abroad.

… Anyway, the overall point here is that the H-1b program is good on the economic merits— not just for U.S. companies, but for their high-skilled employees as well. But after reading multiple days of right-wing social media backlash against skilled immigration, I’m not so sure the economic merits of the program, or even the economic fortunes of the United States of America, are really what they have in mind. Tweets like this one have been sadly common:

MAGA orthodoxy-- with which most American disagree

As so often happens, I think what we’re dealing with here is a battle over America’s cultural and racial identity, which some people only feel comfortable talking about in terms of its economic impacts.

Over the past two days, I have seen a lot of tweets like this from right-wing Twitter users:

…The rightists who denounce Indian Americans on social media believe that we face a choice between a cohesive nation, with rich social ties cemented by bonds of common heritage, and an atomized nation where cohesion is sacrificed on the altar of higher GDP. They believe that by excluding people who aren’t of America’s noble founding stock, we can restore civic trust, stop people from “bowling alone,” and so on.

This is abject fantasy. Perhaps in a nation like Japan or Sweden, where a sense of homogeneity has been cemented over centuries, and big waves of immigration are relatively recent, something like this could make sense. But the United States has been an immigration-fueled polyglot since its very founding.

No sooner had British Americans created the country than it was inundated by Irish Catholic immigrants, causing vast anti-Catholic backlashes and efforts at large-scale deportation. These had barely died down when tensions began to rise in the late 19th century over the arrival of Italians, Poles, Jews, and other East and South Europeans en masse. Today’s anti-immigrant freakout is the third since the founding.

So if you decide to try to strip down America’s population to its founding stock, who will you include? Do the Italians get to stay? How about the Vietnamese refugees who came in the 70s? Are the Irish part of America’s core population, or papist interlopers? What about a Mexican American whose ancestors came in the 1930s? Where do you draw the line? What about someone who looks entirely Asian but who has one ancestor who sailed in on the Mayflower?

Searching for an ethnicity that represents the “true” or “core” American stock is like peeling back the layers of an onion— when you get to the center there’s nothing left.

In practice, any effort to ethnically purify America will just turn the nation against itself— the battles over Indian immigration on Twitter this week will become a template for our daily lives. If you think dealing with woke people calling you a white supremacist at work in 2018 was annoying, imagine spending all day wondering if the U.S. government will declare your ethnicity peripheral to the American national project. Naturally, you would spend a lot of your time fighting to make sure your ethnicity ended up inside the circle that the purifiers ended up drawing. Daily life would thus be reduced to racial conflict.

Americans do not want this. Yes, a majority [plurality, not even close to a majority] voted for Trump, but it was not because they thought he would racially purify the nation. In fact, his victory was driven pretty much entirely by defections of Latinos and Asians from the Democratic coalition. It’s doubtful that those swing voters imagine Trump as an ethnic cleanser.

…[A]t least some people on the new Tech Right are now realizing what kind of tiger— or perhaps, leopard— they’ve chosen to ride. The Trump movement of 2016 had a reputation for being full of racial-nationalist bigotry for a reason— it might have been exaggerated, but it wasn’t just a progressive fantasy cooked up by newsroom staffers at the New York Times. Now, if you’re a tech founder who supports Trump and spends all day posting on Twitter, your daily life involves your so-called political allies denouncing your Indian friends and cofounders and employees and calling for their mass deportation.

Well, such is politics. Meanwhile, in the real world, Indian immigrants and their descendants are hard at work making America an even better place, and I would very much like them to continue.

MAGA’s response to an influx of “Bharat” immigrants will be even more reactionary than their discomfort with westernized Indians. While urban, educated Indian immigrants fit a model minority stereotype that some Republicans grudgingly tolerate, “Bharat” migrants— as we saw above, poorer, darker-skinned, and culturally distinct— is sure to provoke deeper anxieties about immigration, economic competition, and cultural dilution among MAGAts, sure to fuel nativist rhetoric, stoke fears of “foreign invasion,” and reinforce MAGA’s broader opposition to multiculturalism.