
The rise and fall of Indians in the US

Summary
As Donald Trump returns amid raging controversies over H1B visas, a new book documents the rise of so-called ‘model minority’ Indians in the USWhen Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe and turned up on the American continent, he was in fact trying to reach India. Native Americans came to be called Indians, and the continent got populated by people from Europe. Triumphalist Americans, who would later characterise their land seizure as “manifest destiny", were the original “undocumented aliens", to use the term with which the United States describes people who enter the country without proper papers.
They saw nothing wrong in treating the land as theirs to take, and displaced and killed many native Americans. To meet their needs of agriculture, commerce and industry, they brought people forcibly to the US. The hierarchy was clear; the enslaved had no rights, the immigrant white population began to see itself as native. So where did Indians from India belong in all this historical shift?

In Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America, Meenakshi Ahamed, a US-based journalist and writer who has worked at the World Bank, offers a fascinating account of the early history of Indians who came to the US. The earliest to arrive in significant numbers were in the 19th century, when Punjabi farmers came to work on farms and build railroads. Some of them claimed citizenship as “Aryans", but the US judiciary frustrated their attempts. Ahamed recalls the story of Bhagat Singh Thind, who came as a student in 1913 to California, fought for the US Army in World War I, was granted citizenship, but it was revoked within days, because he was not white.
Between 1908 and 1923, some 67 Indians had acquired US citizenship in different states, but many were rescinded since there were doubts if Indians were “free white persons". It was only after a change in law in 1946 that racial qualification for citizenship was struck off. It would take another two decades before restrictions would be removed on who could migrate to the US, and once the gates were opened, many more Indians moved there. Ahamed was one of them. She came to study in 1970, with the ridiculously low $8 allowance India permitted students going overseas, essentially forcing them to fend for themselves, rely on scholarship, or the kindness of strangers.
Also read: Mapping India's Korea connection
Americans look up wistfully to the words in Emma Lazarus’s poem in which the Statue of Liberty extends a welcome to the world’s tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But that sounds quaintly ironic now. Today the US is keen to erect insurmountable barriers to make it nearly impossible for the tired, poor and persecuted to enter legally. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric promised mass deportations the day he takes office, and foreign students on vacation or projects abroad have been told to return to the US before his inauguration on 20 January, lest they be denied entry.
There is a raging debate that has racist overtones about skilled professionals as well, including those holding the coveted H1B visa, which allows a foreigner to work in specific jobs and industries. Right-wing influencers have created memes insulting Indian Americans: Alex Rosen prepared a fake petition to stop the spread of H1B virus and got unsuspecting Indians to sign it, while Laura Loomer, who had worked for the Trump campaign, has called Indians “third world invaders". Republican-leaning Indians are appalled, some writing anguished posts on social media.
The H1B programme was created to ease temporary labour shortages in the US, but it has become the pathway to immigration for hundreds of thousands of professionals, including a large number of Indians. Many of these Indians work in the Silicon Valley, or elsewhere in Corporate America, and they reinforce the argument that Indians in the US are better educated and successful. Many get naturalised and are ranked among the highest earners.
It is that sub-set that’s the focus of Ahamed’s account of Indians in America—and, indeed, it is a sub-set—and that limits the vision and scope of what the book could have been.
The book is an awestruck view of the elite, Indian 1%—the IIT-educated, MIT- or Ivy League-trained skilled professionals who have run companies, set up businesses, helped cure diseases, or engaged with public policy. By focusing on these three broad areas—techies, healers and influencers, as she describes them—Ahamed leaves out a vast number of professions from the scope of her inquiry.
By speaking of “genius" and “meteoric rise", her gaze falls on those Indians who are part of the so-called “model minority" in America. Her list has few surprises: the early movers Kanwal Rekhi, Suhas Patil, and Vinod Khosla are there, so is Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen, who heads Adobe, and Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks. She is oddly dismissive of Sundar Pichai of Google and Parag Agrawal, who briefly ran Twitter (now X), doesn’t get any mention.
Also read: Studies on the genetic lineage of Indians could serve dubious ends
While admiring their technical brilliance and wealth, she does not probe their politics: she sees them as Silicon Valley “bros" who know how to develop technologies and run large companies, but she does not examine their views which are often a muddle of outward liberalism and fiscal conservatism. They have come to the US from fine, fiercely competitive Indian academic institutions, and come to believe that their success is largely due to merit, ignoring social capital. Deeply distrustful of reservations at home, the Silicon Valley elite prevailed upon California’s governor to veto an overwhelming vote in the Californian state legislature to grant “caste" the status of a protected category, which would have enabled Dalit engineers to use civil rights laws to defend their rights in case of discrimination.
Among the healers, curiously, her focus is on physicians who have built successful parallel careers as writers (Abraham Verghese, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Atul Gawande) or new-age gurus like Deepak Chopra. Well-known these names certainly are, and exceptionally competent physicians too, but the selection is odd because it focuses on skills that go beyond their technical brilliance as doctors and more as public figures. Among the influencers, two politicians make the cut (Nikki Haley and Ro Khanna), a legal academic (Neal Katyal) and writer-broadcaster Fareed Zakaria.
At the outset, Ahamed acknowledges Indian American success in other areas, including the creative arts, and the early part of the book is engrossing, though it turns predictable later. It takes the reader for granted by not explaining some of the business jargon and industry terms her interviewees use. Her conversations with the people she profiles are stilted—they read like drafts and jump from a question-and-answer format to her own commentary, referring to the individuals in the third person, making it harder to stay engaged. As the interviews appear to have been published verbatim without much editorial intervention, there is a reluctance to probe some of the assertions.
Generalisations get perpetuated. One glaring omission is the hospitality industry. A 2021 study suggests that nearly half the motels in America are run by Indian Americans, and many of them are Patels from Gujarat. Granted, they aren’t part of the IIT-educated elite, but their ability to spot an opportunity is remarkable, and the way they’ve extended help to their own kind is a saga in itself. It does sound triumphant, but as the academic Pawan Dhingra shows in his book, Life Behind the Lobby, this success has been earned the hard way, and there is an underbelly too.
Also missing are other visible professions such as standup comedy, journalism, and less visible ones, such as the non-profit sector (where Ahamed herself plays a prominent role), and academia. Elsewhere, Indians in America are visible but unseen, to borrow a Salman Rushdie phrase: from cops on subways to attendants at check-in counters; from junior civil servants to pharmacists; from building janitors to taxi drivers. In fact, the profusion of Indian Americans in such professions is dramatically altering the profile of the community, and Indian Americans are increasingly resembling other Americans, becoming part of an amorphous mass, and not crystal-clear icons of success. And Indians today form a large number of undocumented aliens, many desperately trying to enter the US illegally.
The incoming administration has some fine Indian Americans, like Sriram Krishnan, to advise White House on Artificial Intelligence, but also questionable choices such as Jay Bhattacharya, who went on a crusade against covid-19 lockdowns, and troubling choices such as Kash Patel, whose record in the first Trump administration on national security matters was far from meritorious.
Countering them are Indian Americans who have done their bit to make America a less unequal society: Bhairavi Desai, who has organised taxi workers; the women who founded Sakhi, which offers support to victims of domestic abuse among South Asian communities; progressive politicians like Zohran Mamdani, who is a contender for the New York mayoral election; and other unsung heroes .
These stories would have made Indian Genius richer rather than a feel-good book, offering a slice of reality.
Salil Tripathi is a writer and human rights advocate whose new book is The Gujaratis published by Aleph.
Also read: Veraval and Alang: The Gujarat towns where ships are scrapped