“We are here! We are here! We have arrived!” cheered the lawyer and activist Valarie Kaur, to more than 4,000 south Asian participants mobilizing for Kamala Harris on a Zoom call on Wednesday night.
“I want to name this a historic moment – and as a moment for all of us to come together.” If elected, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee would become the first woman, first Black woman, and first south Asian to win the US presidency.
Kaur’s grandfather, a Sikh farmer from Punjab, India, sailed to the US by steamship in 1913. “He faced detention, threats of deportation, denial of citizenship. Could he imagine that we would be here, in this moment, 111 years later? Could we have imagined, in our lifetime, this moment would come?”
Kaur was one of a series of speakers that included the actor Mindy Kaling, the congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the Philadelphia councilwoman Nina Ahmad, the actor Poorna Jagannathan and other south Asian female leaders who called on south Asian women to rally for Harris.
While views within the south Asian community are mixed – a few speakers, and many listeners on the call, voiced concerns over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza – the possibility of electing Harris in an election where the future of American democracy is at stake has renewed hope for Democrats. In just 24 hours, the Harris campaign shattered fundraising records, raising $81m, and south Asian organizations have been quick to mobilize. Indian American Impact Fund, an organization that supports Indian Americans in political office, launched the website desipresident.com with the slogan “Kamala ke Saath” (which means “with Kamala” in Hindi). Ananya Kachru, co-chair of high school and college Democrats outreach for South Asians for America, reported seeing a “700% uptick in voter registration in under 72 hours” – with a majority of those being voters under 35.
The 2024 election brings with it another historic moment: Usha Vance, the wife of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, a woman of Indian heritage and a child of immigrants could become America’s second lady. The illumination of two women with Indian heritage – who represent opposing visions for America’s future – demands reckoning with an often overlooked and complex history about the ascendance of a community that makes up just over 1% of the US population.
This new political reality has put the spotlight on the US’s Indian American communities. People of Indian descent make up only 0.6% of America’s eligible voter population, according to AAPI Data, a non-profit that tracks data about Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. Yet Indian Americans represent nearly double that proportion in Congress, with five US representatives – Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ami Bera and Shri Thanedar – who call themselves the Samosa caucus. (If the Virginia state senator Suhas Subramanyam wins his bid for the state’s 10th congressional district this fall, there will be six.)
About 40 Indian Americans occupy seats in state legislatures, two Indian Americans have served as governors, and a number of Indian Americans occupy positions on Capitol Hill and within the White House. The group’s recent political ascendance is underscored by economic success: Indian Americans are also one of the wealthiest and most highly educated immigrant groups in the country, with a median income of $120,000. All together, this phenomenon has brought a new focus on Indian Americans, in particular, with the New York Times hailing the ethnic group as “a political force”.
While Indians make up the second-largest immigrant group in America, according to Pew Research, they are also relatively recent arrivals. In 2000, the population was about 2 million; by 2019, it was 4.6 million. “It is a pretty remarkable story of a people who were denied citizenship until [1946], and facing very limited entry until 1965,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder of AAPI Data and a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside.
While the Indian American community’s growing presence in politics is, indeed, noteworthy, it is troubling to present the phenomenon without proper context: some writers and leaders have used it to claim systemic racial discrimination does not exist in the US.
There are many complex factors behind the rise of this immigrant group, but the most common – and harmful – narrative used to explain it is simply: Indian American success is innate. In the Wall Street Journal, the writer Tunku Varadarajan argued that Vance’s status “exemplifies the rise of an immigrant group that has prospered without quotas or affirmative action” and wrote that Indian American success more or less disproves “claims of ‘systemic racism’ and pervasive ‘white privilege’”.
In her 2019 memoir, With All Due Respect, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants, put it more bluntly, claiming of Indian Americans: “We’re just good at being Americans. And that says as much about America as it does about us.”
The story is told by both Republicans and Democrats alike. In a 2021 phone call with the Nasa engineer Swati Mohan, Joe Biden said: “It’s amazing. Indian – of descent – Americans are taking over the country: you, my vice-president, my speechwriter, Vinay … You guys are incredible … We bring the best out of every single solitary culture in the world here in the United States of America, and we give people an opportunity to let their dreams run forward.”
This story of Indian American exceptionalism – in which success and achievement are portrayed as inherently Indian traits that blossom in a meritocracy – is often deployed as a means to reinforce a fantasy of America as a post-racial society where the American dream is achievable for all. This myth “has such lasting power because it’s a feel-good story. It affirms some of the deepest values that Americans care about … [that] if you work hard, you will succeed, and America is the land of opportunity and is a nation of immigrants,” says Ellen Wu, history professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. With two prominent Indian Americans in the election, “I imagine we will see quite a bit of that retelling as the election cycle continues,” she says.
But not all Indians in America are well-off: Indians represent the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants, and an estimated 9% of people of Indian origin in America lived in poverty as of 2014. What’s often excluded from this reductive narrative are the unique set of circumstances and privileges that allowed some Asian Americans – and many Indian Americans, specifically – to benefit in a way that few other immigrant groups have been able to in America.
To understand this rise – and why we should be wary of hollow celebrations of representation based on ethnic or racial background – one must understand the context of immigration history, especially as the political and economic power of Indian Americans grows.
Most American schools teach little to nothing about Asian American history. In the 1850s, laborers from southern China emigrated to the US and Canada to help build railroads and dig in mines during the Gold Rush, representing 20% of California’s labor force by 1870. White laborers began to view the Chinese as an economic threat, and after a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment, in 1882, America passed the Chinese Exclusion Act – the nation’s first race-based immigration ban. (The presence of south Asians in the US dates back to the 1700s, but began to grow in the late 1800s, leading to similar racial animus).
The US later effectively barred immigration from Asian countries under the Immigration Act of 1924. Immigration was allowed in the 1940s and 1950s, when Asian immigrants became eligible for naturalization – but was still extremely limited by quotas.
“Between the Gold Rush era of the mid-19th century to world war II, Asians in America had a very distinct position in what we might think of as the racial order,” says Wu. “American society and the government had decided that Asians were decidedly or definitively not white.” As non-white people, Asians were ineligible to become naturalized US citizens – they could not vote, could not marry white people, did not have access to certain jobs, and lived in segregated areas.
After the second world war, against the backdrop of the cold war, a subtle but important shift occurred in America’s racial categorization of Asian Americans. In this period, “it’s not so much that they are decidedly or definitively not white, but it’s more that they are regarded as decidedly or definitively not Black,” Wu says. The Black liberation movement of the civil rights era, along with shifting attitudes during the cold war, compelled American leaders to end the quota system and pass the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act. The law, which opened up US borders to Asia, Latin America, and other regions, favored highly skilled and educated workers with strong family ties, leading to a mass influx of Indians and other Asian groups. The “model minority myth” – a story that portrayed the rise of an Asian American middle class as a result of work ethnic, close-knit families, and innate intellect – took hold in the American psyche.
The myth – like all racial stereotypes – is ultimately harmful, as it positions the relative success of a few Asian Americans as a way to deny, and ultimately ignore, America’s structural inequalities and racism. The myth also obscures the complex and diverse experiences of a group that encompasses more than 20 million people and 24 countries of origin into a flat image, dismissing the reality that Asian Americans experience the widest wealth gap of any ethnic group. Embracing the myth makes it nearly impossible to address inequalities faced by Asian Americans, including a recent surge in racist violence, because it argues that Asian Americans do not struggle. And Asian Americans who invoke these myths are more likely to harbor anti-Black attitudes. The former Republican presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy (a family friend of the Vances), for example, has called affirmative action “a cancer on our national soul” and dismissed Juneteenth as “useless”.
The myth of the model minority also erases three major advantages that enable a majority of immigrants from India to prosper in American civic life: familiarity with a democratic voting system, proficiency in English, and resources in India. Immigrants coming from democratic countries are more likely to participate in American elections, says Ramakrishnan, and English – a legacy of British colonial rule – is taught in the middle- and upper-class communities that produce most of the immigrants who come to America. Speaking English makes it easier to consume American news and decreases the risk of language-based discrimination.
The third factor that has shaped Indian American success is privilege in India. According to The Other One Percent: Indians in America, the Indian American diaspora is the result, in large part, of an invisible but rigid stratification of caste and class, with those from the highest classes and castes in India – Brahmins being at the top – having access to the best schools and jobs, which prepare workers for white-collar jobs and positions in America. In America’s Black-white racial hierarchy, many writers and scholars assume that, due to skin color, Indian Americans are “closer to Black than white”, says the book’s co-author Sanjoy Chakravorty, professor of geography and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University and visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. But this categorization “ignores India’s own system of bias and prejudice, which has produced a hierarchy, social – caste and tribe – educational, and increasingly an income hierarchy”, he explains. “What you have, really, is the arrival of people who are used to wielding power.”
Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, exemplifies some of these privileges and the complexity of analysis: Gopalan came to America in 1958, at the age of 19, to pursue a master’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley – when only 12,000 Indian immigrants lived in the US. She grew up as a British colonial subject in India and experienced discrimination in America, becoming involved in civil rights activism and marrying Donald Harris, a Jamaican-born Berkeley graduate student. But she also clung to her Brahmin identity, telling the San Francisco Weekly in 2003: “In Indian society we go by birth. We are Brahmins; that is the top caste. Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money.”
(Caste-based discrimination is beginning to receive more attention in America. In 2023, Seattle became the first US city to ban it, and some colleges are revising policy to outlaw caste discrimination. A similar proposal to explicitly ban caste-based discrimination in California failed.)
The prominence of Harris and Vance, who represent starkly different ideologies, is bringing these complex histories to the forefront, illustrating the limitations of representation discourse. While many Indian Americans may have seen themselves in Vance as she faced racist backlash at the RNC, on Wednesday’s Zoom call, the comedian Pooja Reddy – who, like Vance, identifies as south Indian and Telegu – articulated the need to look beyond shared ethnicity. “This is our moment to understand and realize that Usha Vance is proving that all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” she said. “And I want us to get through to and shake the people in our communities who may be swayed to vote for Trump because of the false sense of security that she’s bringing to his campaign out of south Asian women. I’ve seen that and it’s abhorrent.”
While Indian Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, it should not be a surprise that Vance has reportedly helped shape the political rise of her husband, a candidate who backs a national abortion ban. Or that Ramaswamy, who dismisses the “climate change agenda” as a “hoax”, can hold rightwing views. “I think we should be less surprised, especially now that there is a fair number of Indian Americans [in politics],” says Chakravorty. “Libertarianism is actually something that I think comes naturally to a good chunk of Indian Americans who have only known privilege and success their entire lives, and they think that they are special, that they’re gifted, and that it has nothing to do with the starting points and the advantages that they have. And to stretch that into the Republican party and to seek political power and influence within that identity, it seems like a natural step.”
Nor should it be a surprise that India’s rightwing Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, maintains strong support among Indian Americans (including with the Biden administration) and those who vote as progressives in the US. “In India they are dominant, and the right supports the dominance, and in the US they are not dominant, they are a minority, and they support the party that supports the minority,” Chakravorty explains. Forgetting these diverse and fraught histories allows rightwing ideologies to take hold and deepen. As the Hindu supremacy watchdog Savera warns: “Hindu supremacy and the US right wing have been converging for a long time, and Usha Vance is just the tip of the iceberg.”
For south Asian women who carry the weight of these oft-overlooked legacies, the 2024 election is especially complicated. Kaur acknowledged some of the conflicting feelings in her Wednesday evening comments while balancing the historic nature of a Harris presidency. “Now for some of us, it’s uncomplicated for us to be here. We are filled with excitement and presence,” Kaur said. “For others of us, it is complicated for us to be here. We have spent some time protesting the policies of this administration – and yet we are here.”
Ultimately, she said, “we know that the way to create a path to the future is through a Harris presidency, and will open up a window, a portal of possibility, for the rest of us to mobilize, to organize, to labor for the policies we need and the America that we dream … where all of us are welcome.”
A lesson in history can also offer some hope: for those who fear Harris is “too risky” to elect on account of her being a Black and south Asian woman, Ramakrishnan points to Dalip Singh Saund, who was born under British colonial rule in Punjab, India, and became America’s first Asian American member of Congress in 1957 against arguably greater odds than Harris faces today. Saund, who came to the US to study in a masters program at UC Berkeley in the 1920s, did not have the right to be a citizen or own land. He became a farmer and successfully fought to change laws that banned Indians from naturalizing. The law allowing citizenship was passed in 1946, and in 1956, Saund won his bid for Congress. “Of course, there is Barack Obama,” says Ramakrishnan. “But I think we can also look back to examples such as Saund, on the ability [of a person of color] to appeal to a larger set of Americans. To at least show that not only is it possible, but it’s been done before.”
Prachi Gupta is the author of They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us