The phenomenal upsurge of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris in July and August is inspirational for me to witness – and support. She brings a multi-ethnic background to her Presidential candidacy that is unique – and illustrative of how significantly the American population has become so diverse. While it is obvious that an over-emphasis on ethnic identities could also operate negatively, I am personally impressed with how immigration patterns of the past fifty years have become so well integrated into the American politic. And for me, it is how Indian Americans, in particular, have emerged as a significant presence in the American political world that has caught my eye.
While I am especially pleased that Kamala Harris has a combined heritage of both black and Indian lineage, it was only when I realized that there was also an Indian American associated with the Republican candidate for Vice President that I marveled at how unusual this is, given how vociferously anti-immigration the Republican Party has become under its current leadership. The parallel is quite striking that the current vice president, Kamala Harris (and now the Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party) is an Indian-American whose mother’s family is from India, while the parents of Usha Vance, the wife of the newly designated Republican vice presidential candidate are also from India.
And most coincidentally, Kamala Harris’s mother came from the state of Tamil Nadu, while Usha Vance’s family came from the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh happens to be a state that was spun off from Tamil Nadu in 1953. (In those days, this much larger state was known as Madras state. Thus, Madras became the predominantly Tamil-speaking Tamil Nadu, and the Telegu-speaking area was spun off to become Andhra Pradesh.)
My personal connection to all of this is what inspires me to look more closely at this apparent coincidence. I spent half of my childhood in India, where my father was a medical missionary. As a child, then, I went to a boarding school in Kodaikanal, in the part of Madras state that eventually became Tamil Nadu. The train route that I took from the boarding school to my family’s home in the northern state of Bihar included a night train from Kodai Station to the city of Madras (now known as Chennai) and another train (two nights and one day) passing through Andhra Pradesh on its way to the city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata). And then, there was another train from Calcutta to Rampurhat before a jeep ride from the train station to Mohulpahari. But the intriguing part for me today is that I may well have crossed paths with either Kamala Harris’s mother Shymala Gopalan (who left India to study in the United States in 1958) or Usha Vance’s mother and father Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri (who were Telegu-speaking but migrated from Chennai to the US in the late 1970s).
Although I certainly have no intention of delving more deeply into these geographic linkages, I do have a personalized interest in the very substantial increase in immigrants to the United States (and Canada, for that matter) from the South Asian subcontinent – and India, in particular – that has occurred since those years that I was growing up there. Most of this happened after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 was enacted, although there were individuals like Shymala who came as students before 1965. But according to the Migration Policy Institute, there were only 12,000 Indian immigrants living in the United States in 1960. Then, by 1980, there were 206,000 – a huge increase. The number doubled by 1990 and more than doubled by 2000 (over 1 million by then). And in 2015, the MPI shows the Indian immigrant population to be 2,4 million. And what’s more, the total of the Indian American population, whether immigrant or native-born, is now 4.9 million or 1.35% of the US population!
One could throw in some other significant statistics here. The Indian-American population is younger and more highly educated than national averages of the population generally. The most recent data on median incomes show Indian-Americans with a median income of $107,000 versus $51,000 for immigrants generally – and versus $56,000 for the US population generally. The top recipients of the H-1B temporary visas for employment are from India – close to 80% of them! I recall working at AT&T with legal specialists whose sole responsibility was to clear South Asians (i.e. Indians) for H-1B visas at Bell Labs. And since 2010, a higher proportion of these Indian immigrants are in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering or math). And, of course, they have a high degree of English-language proficiency. It is no surprise, then, that Indian-Americans have become well established and quite visible in high-tech places like Silicon Valley, California or Princeton, New Jersey.
I have participated in a number of scholarly discussions recently on the future of India itself. Some worry about the brain drain to places like the United States, and cite the larger proportions of Indians migrating to the US and elsewhere who are highly educated and employed in more highly skilled positions than most immigrant groups. But I did find it interesting on a trip to Panama just a few months ago that I became aware of a rather substantial number of what appeared to be South Asians (mostly men) on my flight from Paris to Panama City. As I explained to my friends in Panama the following day, they did not appear to be either tourists or businessmen heading to Panama. They appeared to be on their way somewhere else – i.e. like the southern border crossing route from Mexico into the US!
My friends in Panama confirmed that the flights into Panama, primarily those from Istanbul but also from elsewhere in Europe, are regularly filled with “transit” passengers. They do not have visas to enter Panama, but they are in transit to other nearby countries, such as Nicaragua which does not require visas for entry. They are more than likely part of the changing nature of migrants crossing into Mexico and from there into the US. They are typically being joined by migrant groups on foot crossing Panama by way of the Darien Gap from Colombia. The overall numbers moving through Panama are in the thousands per day, we were told. Not only from other Central American countries but also from India, among other distant countries, like those who appeared to be on my flight from Paris.
Could this really be? As the Migration Policy Institute confirmed, there is quite a backlog for legal migration from India to the US. The MPI report noted that the State Department in 2017 was processing visa applications from India that had been filed back in September 2003! So, in spite of the large numbers who are benefiting from the visa route to the US, there is still a country-by-country quota that affects how many can came from India. Ergo, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of Indians (and other Asian groups) who are crossing the Mexican/US border with the hopes of winning claims for asylum (or not getting caught at the border) as an alternative to the visa route.
According to a recent Pew Research Center report, there were some 725,000 undocumented Indians in the US in 2021. This constitutes the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the US – “more than from any other outside the Western Hemisphere”. I imagine that many of them hold expired student or other temporary visas and have simply not pursued other legal channels, but I sense that more of them have indeed been crossing the border from Mexico (and to some extent also from Canada) in the hopes of successfully claiming asylum. If Trump and Vance are elected in November and carry through on their pledge to forcibly remove 11 million undocumented migrants from the US, this would clearly include that 725,000 to be forcibly returned to India! What a catastrophe! Might Usha Vance have some sympathy for their plight? Might Trump tone down his rhetoric on this? It was shocking to see a photo of the Republican Convention with a sea of placards calling for “Mass Deportation Now” in the midst of others calling to “Make America Strong Again” and “Trump Will End the Ukraine War”.
All right, back to the more general commentary topic! I have been personally inspired by the impact of multi-ethnic diversity in the US – even as I currently live as an American ex-pat in France (where I also appreciate the multi-ethnic diversity – but that’s another subject). I have become steadily more aware of the nature and significance of this ethnic diversity, particularly as it has implications for democracy and governance. True, the 1960s were especially significant for the civil rights movement and efforts to end discrimination against African-Americans, a strikingly different issue from that of discrimination against immigrants. But the way that Americans have treated different immigrant groups in distinct but inconsistently defined racial categories has to be directly linked to this integral part of American history. Could it be that the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 stimulated such a huge opening up of the immigration channels because of its association with dramatically improved civil rights for minorities?
One important aspect of that has been the many different ways that Indian-Americans have been absorbed into the American political culture. Vice President Kamala Harris has both an Indian-American heritage from her mother and a black heritage from her Jamaican father but mostly a mix of the two within the American culture in which she grew up and went to school. Although people like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana or Nikki Haley in South Carolina are two Indian-Americans who were elected to public office as Republicans, the Indian-American vote and most of the politically active Indian-Americans have been Democrats.
Currently there are five Indian-American Democrats in the House of Representatives – Amy Bera and Ro Khanna from California, Pramila Jayapal from Washington, Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois, and Shri Thanedar from Michigan. In fact, this is the largest of any Asian-American group currently serving in the US Congress. Historically, there have been many more Japanese-Americans, as well as others with East Asian roots (China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea, Samoa) than any with South Asian roots. The larger Indian-American delegation of today is thus a more recent but significantly notable development.
Many other Indian-Americans stand out in various public service or media categories. President Barack Obama appointed three to top administrative positions – Rajiv Shah as head of the US Agency for International Development, Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General (also in this position with the Biden Administration) and Aneesh Chopra as the first American Federal Chief Technology Officer (USO).
After his tenure with Obama, by the way, Aneesh Chopra ran for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and lost in the primary. I campaigned for him while visiting my daughter, who worked in his campaign and who, herself, subsequently moved on to other positions associated with the Democratic Party in Virginia.
While my daughter now works for a Korean-American Delegate who also happens to chair the Virginia Asian American and Pacific Islander Caucus in the Virginia Assembly, this caucus currently has more Indian-Americans than any other Asian group. One of them, State Senator Suhas Subramanyan, is currently the Democratic candidate for a US House seat, and another of them, State Senator Ghazala Hashmi, is running for Lieutenant Governor in the Virginia Democratic primary in 2025.
It’s these Virginia connections that have been especially striking for me, but I also note that I’ve crossed paths in my own career with other prominent American-Indians like Fareed Zakaria at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ajaypal Banga at the World Bank, and Indra Nooyi, the former CEO at Pepsi. I’ve also been aware of the strong contingent of Indian-Americans in major high-tech industries – especially Satya Nedella at Microsoft and Sundar Pichai at Alphabet (parent company of Google). There is a widely acknowledged presence of Indian-Americans in start-ups as well as top positions at IBM, Facebook and MasterCard as well as Google and Microsoft. These are all just the most visible examples of the substantial growth over the past 50 years in the Indian-American ethnic group in the United States.
It would seem, too, that the links that JD Vance himself has had with Indian-Americans in his path to political prominence are more extensive than the major role that his wife Usha Vance has played in his career and life. One can’t ignore her key role – as a graduate of Yale Law (where she met JD Vance) and as a successful practicing lawyer in her own right. And he has described her as “brilliant”, “way more accomplished than I am”, “his Yale spirit guide” and “instrumental in his spiritual rediscovery”. Somehow, we are told, the strong values of her Hindu parents guided her to support his conversion to Catholicism in 2019.
Interestingly, though, Senator Vance has connected with many other prominent Indian-Americans in his business and political career. This has mostly been through partnering with Indian-Americans in a variety of start-ups funded by his major financial mentor Peter Thiel. Thiel is also the source of the millions that helped JD Vance win his Senate seat in Ohio. But others from his Yale Law School days also stand out – including Vivek Ramaswami (the libertarian who was himself a Republican presidential candidate this year) and Jamil Jivani who is currently a Conservative MP in Canada and is reportedly one of JD Vance’s “best friends”. One wonders, did all these come out of his courtship with Usha?
Well, my inspiration to delve into the Usha phenomenon is only the latest spur to my interest in the role of Indian-Americans as a part of the increasingly multi-ethnic American culture. I do have the very personal connection of spending so much of my childhood in India, and subsequently studying and teaching South Asian politics in an earlier phase of my professional career.
Sadly enough, though, I don’t have any Indian friends from those childhood years in India. They all stayed in India, and I left. During my last visit to India, I did meet the son of the lawyer who worked with the Santal Mission (where my dad had worked) in Dumka, where the Santal Mission was headquartered. I knew Dumka well, as the large town just a few miles from village of Mohulpahari where my father had built and run the mission hospital.
We met on a train to Rampurhat that had come to an abrupt stop at a station just outside of Kolkata because Santal protestors had blocked the railroad tracks some miles ahead. While waiting for the track to be freed up (which took several hours), he introduced me to his wife from Bangalore. They had met in Dubai where they had computer-related jobs, and he was bringing her to Dumka to meet his family for the first time. How very modern! I never heard back from them, but I assume that they happily returned to Dubai. All the other Santals who welcomed me to Mohulpahari on that visit remained committed to their work there. Several of them had indeed studied in the States and had passed through my family home in Minnesota, but none had migrated away.
Sources for this commentary:
“Undocumented Indian migrants chart new path to US via Canada”, April 10, 2024 By Masood Farivar at https://www.voanews.com/a/undocumented-indian-migrants-chart-new-path-to-us-via-canada/7564143.html
“Indian Immigrants in the United States” AUGUST 31, 2017 SPOTLIGHT By Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indian-immigrants-united-states-2015
“Indians in the US Fact Sheet” by Abby Budiman (2021) at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/
