Why is the right obsessed with Indians all of a sudden?
Why is the right obsessed with Indians all of a sudden?
For many Texans, the second weekend of September was a moment for the state to shine. The Texas Longhorns, the University of Texas at Austin’s storied football team, upset the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes in a dramatic comeback win.
But for Bo French, the Republican candidate for railroad commissioner, a powerful position that was born to regulate railroads but today oversees the state’s sizable oil and gas industry, the most notable part was the number of South Asians in the crowd.
“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he posted on X over a picture of celebrating students. In case there was any ambiguity as to the problem, he added that images like the one he shared showed “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”
Key takeaways
- A post by a Texas Republican attacking South Asian college students at a football game has brought national attention to rising anti-Indian sentiment on the right.
- Far-right influencers are targeting people of Indian heritage, and using middle-class fears of competition in education and jobs to find a foothold in the GOP.
- Indian Americans in Texas who spoke to Vox are concerned by the trend, but hopeful that they will continue to win communities’ hearts and minds.
At least some of the students in the viral photograph were US citizens. And the post — and French’s candidacy — have since become a major political flashpoint, even weeks later, pushing a growing far-right campaign to demonize people of Indian descent into the national conversation.
“He assumed every brown person in that picture is not American, which is scary because he is a politician running for statewide office,” said Sidharth Ram, the founder of the Indian American Advocacy Council and a technology consultant who lives in San Antonio.
This phenomenon has become especially prevalent in Texas, which has one of the largest concentrations of Indian Americans in the country — over half a million people, according to one estimate by Pew Research Center. Many community members there have been shocked by the rise in prejudice in a state that has long been a haven for South Asian immigrants seeking a better life with few incidents.
Karthik Soora, a Houston-based entrepreneur and former candidate for state senate, said that his experience in Texas has been mostly positive.
“I’ve just never experienced any of this in real life,” he said of the online hate.
But over the past two years, he’s seen a marked change in the discourse and a shift toward what he called “vitriol and hatred.”
Much of this vitriol has been boosted by online influencers who have descended on bustling Indian American communities like Frisco, a suburb of Dallas. They’ve trained their cameras on South Asians, warning about a desi takeover of Texas.
Ravi Kapur, an Indian American and the founder of the South Asian television network Diya TV, said that social media incentives are helping drive the influencers to embrace anti-Indian messaging online.
“You are inciting rage,” he said. “You are inciting the public to engage on your post, and thus you become a bigger figure online.”
Some of the videos are completely banal; one viral post just features Indian Americans walking peacefully around a Costco doing their shopping like anyone else.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a purely online phenomenon. But as French shows, far-right nativists, who are broadly hostile to immigrant and minority groups, are increasingly finding a footing in electoral politics. And while a few GOP dissidents like the outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (who lost his reelection primary bid) have said they will not vote for French, the state’s most prominent candidates like Gov. Greg Abbott and Senate candidate Ken Paxton have not pulled their support.
Meanwhile, parts of the right-wing coalition turned one immigration debate — access to the H1B visa — into a lightning rod, highlighting it as a pathway for Indians to immigrate to the United States. The late Charlie Kirk singled out Indians, once saying that “America does not need more visas for people from India.” Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk led, is one of the organizations deploying influencers to scandalize the Indian community in Texas.
But the question remains why Indian Americans have become a target.
In the Trump era, the minorities who’ve faced the brunt of right-wing attacks tend to be working class: think Trump’s false claims about Mexicans deploying rapists across the border or Haitians devouring people’s pets. A typical MAGA critique is that immigrants soak up safety-net funding or that their “third world” culture — another Bo French obsession — is dangerously incompatible with American life.
Some influencers on the far right, like Laura Loomer, do point to poverty in India to denigrate Indians in similar ways to other immigrants. But, broadly speaking, this attack has little resonance in America.
Indian Americans are among the most successful diaspora groups in the United States. The stereotypes about Indians typically revolve around Tiger Moms and small business owners. They have some of the highest incomes and strongest families while disproportionately being represented in the ranks of elite professions like doctors and the tech sector. And the community is widely seen as well-integrated — the cheering students at the Longhorns game were, after all, doing exactly what every other UT college football fan was doing that day.
Swapan Dhairyawan, a Houston-based Indian American who has long participated in GOP politics, has always seen his community fitting into American life with ease. He posed the hypothetical of asking his daughter whether she was Indian.
“She would say no — I’m an American!” he said.
So why then are we starting to see this white nationalist backlash against immigrants who are by all indications rapidly assimilating — the very thing conservatives often say they want?
The roots of anti-Indian hate
A 2024 study conducted by a team led by Yale immigration researcher Leah Boustan may provide one part of the answer: Indian immigration is helping provoke the latest wave of middle-class status anxiety.
Boustan and her colleagues examined the composition of high-income suburban school districts in California between the years 2000 and 2016. What they found was that as more Asian students arrived in a school district, white enrollment started to go down. Essentially, they found a new form of “white flight” — the phenomenon that originally described white families leaving areas that were populated by African Americans and Hispanics.
Why might white families be fleeing from Asian students, who are often stereotyped as studious?
Boustan said in an interview that her paper could not deduce exactly why the white flight was occurring. But she offered a theory, pointing to the fact that the University of California system offers admissions benefits to some applicants who are in the top of their high school class.
“What we saw is that when Asian students arrive in one of these high-income school districts, overall test scores go up, but white test scores do not. They just stay flat,” she said, suggesting that this might be one factor driving white families to leave these districts.
Asian Americans’ success in top state schools was a sensitive political issue in the run-up to the period covered by Boustan’s study. California voters passed a ballot initiative banning consideration of race in public colleges and universities admissions in 1996 over the objections of critics, who sometimes warned schools would be overrun with Asians if it were enacted, and that it would keep out other minority students. Without some form of affirmative action, President Bill Clinton warned in one 1995 interview, “there are universities in California that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans.”
Although Boustan’s team studied California, not Texas, it’s worth mentioning that for almost 30 years Texas has had a law in place guaranteeing entry to its public colleges and universities to eligible students in the state who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class (the law works differently for UT Austin, which for fall 2026 automatically admitted students in the top 5 percent of their class).
This sets up a potentially fierce competition between the high-performing children of ambitious Indian American immigrants and the rest of Texas.
With that finding in mind, maybe what bothered French and like-minded nativists so much is not that Indians are refusing to integrate into American society as much as their rapid rise while other groups are left behind. The more uneasy that middle-class families feel about their own prospects, the more they’ll see successful newcomers — like, say, students at the state’s most competitive school — as a threat. And while those conditions have existed in prior eras, the rise of far-right influencers who can prey on those fears for an audience of millions — and link them to explicitly nativist or racist views — adds a new dimension.
How immigration became a target
The policy fight over the H1B visa reflects how these tensions can play out in public in similar ways to other immigration debates. While labor advocates have often raised economic concerns that H1B visas — like immigration more broadly — can loosen labor markets and reduce worker power, many of the far-right influencers are combining these economic concerns with a broader culture war against Indians themselves. They make up the largest share of H-1B visa beneficiaries, with Chinese workers being a distant second.
Sara Gonzales, for instance, a Texas-based right-wing pundit, has simultaneously waged war on H1B visas while also targeting the Indian community as a whole, claiming that they are “mass immigrating here” and “scamming” Americans. The H1B program has become a lightning rod for nativists, while its defenders — including business elites on the right like Elon Musk — argue it’s another case of meritocracy in action, with American companies scouring the world for the very best talent wherever they can find it.
When Abbott responded to French’s viral tweet, he tried to split the difference between nativists and more traditional business-oriented Republicans by pointing to his restrictions on H1Bs. Abbott has long been close to the Indian community in Texas, but he is feeling pressure from the right of his party.
“A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams. The way we win the state is the same way we win football games. We unite under the brand of Texas,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities.”
Exploiting economic fears
Ashish Agrawal, the founder and board chair of the Hindu American civic organization Disha and a resident of the Greater Houston area, said that economic woes may be leading to scapegoating of Indians.
“I believe it’s more of an economic pressure. As people lose their jobs…if they see someone else that doesn’t look like them, right, is still living comfortably, I think that’s causing some of [this resentment],” he said.
Suhag Shukla, who serves as the executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, likened anti-Indian resentment to antisemitism, which often targets Jews for being too successful, with one important distinction.
“For the most part, we’re physically identifiable,” she said. “And then you add all the other elements that the Jewish community has had in terms of economic and educational success…the success and the cohesiveness of their communities, in spite of assimilation, is what’s made them a historic target. And I think you see the same sort of thing with Indian Americans.”
Another factor is that the Indian and broader South Asian community itself has many divisions that can make it difficult to respond to nativist hatred. A plurality of Indian American adults are Hindu, but substantial minorities are Muslim, Christian, and Sikh. Religious differences between South Asian groups have sometimes led to intragroup prejudice.
Yet to many far-right activists, all of these groups are seen as foreign and undesirable. But when influencers target a Hindu temple in Texas or campaign against non-existent Sharia law in the state, it’s harder to generate a united response from South Asians, with each community struggling to defend itself in a silo.
Imran Ghani, Houston’s director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the state and the son of South Asian immigrants, said that these divisions stem from South Asia’s history and are reflected in far-right strategy in the present.
“It was first the British who used divide and conquer, and now it’s the far right,” he said.
How Indian Americans are responding
In the interviews for this piece, one of the things that stood out was how many people proposed responding to the far-right with pragmatism and good-faith community outreach. While they have zero sympathy for nativist hatred, some also believe that Indian Americans themselves can help counter misunderstandings by getting more involved in civic life and presenting positive examples.
“You have worked hard. We have worked hard,” Dhairyawan, the Houston Republican, said, reflecting on the status of Indians in America. “We have achieved. But don’t flaunt.”
Soora, the entrepreneur, pointed to a controversy that broke out in late 2024 when Vivek Ramaswamy, a prominent Indian Republican who is today running for governor of Ohio, took to X to blame American culture for promoting mediocrity, contrasting it with other cultures that promote excellence. The post set off an explosive fight on the right, with some conservatives siding with Ramaswamy’s praise for self-starting ambition, and others (including fellow Indian American Nikki Haley) decrying his remarks as an unnecessary dig at American values.
“Obviously, Vivek’s Tweet did not make it easy for anybody,” said Ram, the San Antonio tech consultant.
But while they think Indians should be careful about how they talk about their community’s success to the rest of America, they also believe that they should forcefully participate in public life so politicians can’t afford to disregard them.
Dhairyawan, for instance, made the case that Indian Americans like him can continue to show that, like himself, they’re natural conservatives who share similar values with Republican voters.
“The family, faith, God, low taxation…those are the things that I say that we align with,” he noted.
(Surveys suggest that a plurality of Indians consider themselves to be Democrats, but substantial minorities identify as Independent or Republican.)
While he plans to vote mostly for Republicans in the upcoming election, he won’t be giving his vote to French. He’ll likely cast a write-in vote instead.
Others, like Agrawal, intend to continue to work toward boosting Indian American voter turnout to pressure local politicians to take them seriously as a voter bloc.
“If you’re [not] at the table, you’re at the menu,” he said.
Indian American comic Aziz Ansari put it more humorously a few years ago when he said we need a “brown Al Sharpton.”
For Shukla, who works in anti-hate advocacy, there is a reason for Indian Americans to be optimistic. In her view, they’re walking the same path as many other minority groups before them, like Jews, Latinos, Chinese, Italians, and others.
“We have just as much a right to be here and consider America home and protect it in the way we think serves our greater good,” she said. “And we have a brilliant constitutional framework that has allowed pluralism to grow and flourish, and one that empowers each of us to ensure that the promise of America is one that all Americans can enjoy regardless of the color of our skin, where our ancestors came from, or to whom and how we pray.”
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