Indian Americans and the weight of the model minority expectation

Much of this is part of his pledge to put America first, attack what he regards as “wokeism", but above all cut costs and improve government efficiency. So it’s a little surprising that the US chose to deport immigrants who were in the US illegally by military aircraft rather than the usual commercial charters. Reuters estimated a recent deportation flight to Guatemala likely cost $4,675 per migrant. A one-way first-class ticket on a commercial carrier like American Airlines would have cost $853. India is much further away from the US than Guatemala. Last week, a US military aircraft arrived in Amritsar from Texas with a planeload of illegal immigrants.

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It’s not like illegal immigrants have not been deported before, even as far afield as India. But that typically happens without fanfare. Trump uses military planes and handcuffs and chains to drive home a point. He told lawmakers, “For the first time in history, we are locating and loading illegal aliens into military aircraft and flying them back to the places from which they came…We’re respected again." Trump wants everyone to take note of pictures of handcuffed migrants tied together, boarding a military aircraft.

But inadvertently, Trump has brought something else to the world’s notice. India, not just Mexico and Central America, is a major source of illegal migration to the US. The Department of Homeland Security said 1,100 Indians were deported in the fiscal year 2024. The Pew Research Center has already pegged India as the third largest source of unauthorised immigrants in the US, behind Mexico and El Salvador. Pew estimated the number of Indians residing without valid documentation in the US at 725,000.

Indian-Americans like to think of themselves as the “model minority". A recent book bears that pride in its very title: Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America. It interviews the superachievers in the community like Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, Nikki Haley and Deepak Chopra. Its blurb on Amazon calls its “essential reading for anyone interested in the path to success in America." Indeed there is so much success to choose for in tech, medicine and public policy, the author was spoilt for choice. Some high-profile Indian Americans like Sundar Pichai did not make the cut. After all, this is a community whose per capita income exceeds every other ethnic group. They are the most highly educated—72% are college graduates compared 51% of other Asians according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey. The median annual income for Indian American households is $100,000 compared to $53,600 for the general population. Indians are the model minority with the highest capita income, the best educational qualifications and the lowest crime rates. “As a minority, we are the model," writes Suketu Mehta in his book This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (2019). “But it’s not because Indians are some sort of master race; if that were the case, what explains India? America skims off the ‘creamy layer,’ as we used to call the elite of the lower castes in India, from other nations." Most of the Indians who make up the Indian Genius story were already the first-class first type. As a cousin remarked bemusedly after hearing Indian aunties discussing their offspring “Doesn’t anyone come second in anything?"

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But as Trump has inadvertently reminded us, the model minority isn’t as shiny-happy as we would like to think it is. Even in the model minority not everyone gets to be top model. And when anti-immigrant fever rises, desis are just as brown as anyone else. Mehta explains that the resistance to immigration in the US is ultimately “an outgrowth of income inequality". He says in the last three decades, the bottom 50% of American households saw zero growth while the income of the top 1% jumped 300%. In his first presidential campaign Trump went after Wall Street and immigrants but when he came to power, there was a cabinet of billionaires and tax cuts for the rich. The migrants became the scapegoats or as Mehta writes, “The safest thing for the rich to do is to say ‘Don’t blame us, blame them’—pointing to the newest, the weakest the immigrants." The West, he writes is being destroyed “not by migrants, but by the fear of migrants."

Many desis were upset by the images of shackled Indians. Didn’t Trump say not that long ago, “India has never had a better friend than me?" It’s almost as if we are saying chains are understandable when it comes to Mexicans and Salvadorans, but not for the first-class first minority. Sadly for Indians, there’s one less voice to speak up for them now. SAALT, South Asian Americans Leading Together, the oldest national advocacy group fighting for racial justice for South Asians in the US, a group that had played a huge role in countering hate violence after 9/11, shut down last year after 24 years in the trenches.

Almost two decades ago the model minority image took a bit of a beating not because of some stray murderer or some bad-apple embezzler. Kaavya Viswanathan was the poster child of the model minority. She was a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore who landed a $500,000 book contract on the basis of a couple of chapters and an outline she had written. She’d been groomed by IvyWise, a private college admissions consultancy her parents had hired to help her with the admissions process. She was signed by William Morris agency and had a New York Times profile written about her. The movie rights for her book were bought by Dreamworks. Then everything went belly up when The Harvard Crimson reported her novel How Opal Mehta got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, which she finished while taking a full course at Harvard, might have been plagiarised from different sources, including Megan McCafferty and Salman Rushdie. Viswanathan had told New York Times her novel came about because she “was surrounded by the stereotype of high-pressure Asian and Indian families trying to get their children into Ivy League schools." Now the ivy was withering on the vine.

While many desis were aghast at Viswanathan for letting the side down so spectacularly, I wondered if it might not have been a blessing in disguise. While her novel was pulled from the market and the second book cancelled, she did graduate from Harvard with honours. I don’t know what happened to her afterwards but I hope she did alright and in retrospect realised that perhaps Opal Mehta had set her free from the model minority trap. This race to the top has always been a race to conformity with very little room for anyone who didn’t fit this definition of success. Perhaps in the end Opal Mehta was reassuring us that you could fail spectacularly and still live to see another day. Hopefully the same will hold true of those immigrants deported from America with shattered dreams.

But their plight, so glaringly visible now, reminds us that they too are part of the Indian story in America. They too dreamt the American Dream.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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