{"id":9187,"date":"2026-10-22T19:32:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T19:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9187"},"modified":"2026-10-22T19:32:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T19:32:14","slug":"indian-americans-republican-racism-vivek-ramaswamy-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9187","title":{"rendered":"Republican politicians have embraced anti-Indian racism \u2014 and it\u2019s costing them votes"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Two years ago, University of Houston student Vasant Bhatt was doing everything he could to help Republicans regain power. He knocked doors for Sen. Ted Cruz\u2019s reelection campaign and helped organize his community for Donald Trump, two victories he, like many other Republicans, celebrated in 2024. But this week, Bhatt did something unexpected: He voted for Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, and he publicly urged others to do the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bhatt, whose father is a small-business owner, tells The Verge<\/em> he was initially drawn to the Republican Party due to its economic principles. \u201cThe strong belief in individual liberty and limited government,\u201d he says, led him to identify as a conservative. More recently, however, another aspect of his family\u2019s experience has driven him away from the party. As an Indian American, Bhatt feels increasingly unwelcome in a party where racist rhetoric is becoming far too common.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s isolated individuals, but I think there\u2019s an ecosystem as well,\u201d Bhatt says. He has gotten used to people telling him to go back to India, but recently, he\u2019s noticed anti-Indian racism increasing in both frequency and intensity. He wasn\u2019t surprised when prominent conservative commentators replied to his post implying he\u2019s not a real American. The X account for the Waco Young Republicans accused him of voting \u201centirely based on his loyalty to a foreign people over Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indian Americans are reliable voters, with about 70 percent of the voting-eligible population showing up to the polls in presidential election years. And there were signs that the electorate was moving to the right<\/a>, albeit only slightly: The percentage of Indian American voters who lean Democrat dropped from 59 percent in 2020 to 55 percent four years later. About one-third of Indian Americans supported Trump in 2024 \u2014 by no means a majority, but still a sign their votes were up for grabs. Since then, however, they\u2019ve become a favored target for racist self-proclaimed \u201cheritage Americans.\u201d<\/a> Both fringe and mainstream conservatives have portrayed Indian Americans as stealing high-paying tech jobs from white workers and undermining American unity. Conservative commentator Chris Rufo \u2014 who rose to prominence by agitating against diversity efforts in public schools \u2014 even posted a video dissecting the so-called \u201cIndian Question\u201d<\/a> in which he concluded that it\u2019s \u201cnatural\u201d for people to want to stick to their own kind. The right\u2019s embrace of anti-Indian racism is now threatening to reverse Republicans\u2019 recent gains with Indian American voters while promoting immigration restrictions that could shape the country for years to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bhatt began to notice the shift shortly after Trump\u2019s 2024 victory but says it has become especially intense in the run-up to the midterm elections. In September, Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted a picture of hundreds of University of Texas fans celebrating a football victory. \u201cThe problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,\u201d French wrote, referring to the fact that many students in the foreground appeared to be of South Asian descent. Some Texas Republicans condemned French\u2019s racism<\/a>, but French stood by his comments, and others have defended him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWatching people like Jack Posobiec rationalize, excuse, minimize, and even prop up this rhetoric by defending folks like Bo French, I\u2019m not really surprised,\u201d says Bhatt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A few weeks after French\u2019s comments, Vice President JD Vance used his announcement that the Trump administration would be reducing some tech companies\u2019 ability to hire foreign employees as an opportunity to call<\/a> workers on H-1B visas \u201cforeign indentured servants.\u201d India\u2019s Ministry of External Affairs called Vance\u2019s comments \u201cdeeply offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Anti-Indian rhetoric has also translated into policy change. The Washington Post<\/em> notes<\/a> that Republican politicians became more willing to engage in attacks on legal immigrants \u2014 including Indian Americans \u2014 after Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown led to a drastic decrease in unauthorized border crossings. Now that Trump appears to have \u201csolved\u201d the problem of illegal immigration by shutting down asylum at the border, and has unleashed ICE on immigrants living in the country, nativists have found a new target in H-1B workers, many of whom are Indian immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since returning to office, Trump has raised the price of H-1B visas to upwards of $100,000<\/a> and waged a silent war on legal immigration<\/a>, not only slashing the number of people who could legally come to the US but also sending naturalization rates plummeting<\/a>. Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security now promote the idea of \u201cremigration,\u201d or forcibly returning immigrants to their countries of origin regardless of their legal status. The White House has even celebrated<\/a> the fact that legal immigration has fallen since Trump\u2019s return to office. These policies are animated by a belief, prevalent among a faction of Republicans led by White House adviser Stephen Miller, that the problem with immigration isn\u2019t whether people come to America legally, but what types of people come here. A growing chorus of \u201cheritage Americans\u201d<\/a> see all non-white immigrants as incapable of assimilating to American culture, and they\u2019ve selected Indians as their primary target.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI spent years within conservative politics, and I realized that my convictions don\u2019t mean anything if I\u2019m not going to be regarded as an American, or if I\u2019m going to be regarded as a second-class citizen,\u201d says Bhatt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Signs of the Republican Party\u2019s anti-Indian turn have been percolating for years. Shortly after Trump selected Vance as his running mate, far-right streamer Nick Fuentes declared a \u201cgroyper war\u201d<\/a> on the Trump-Vance campaign. Fuentes, who is Mexican American, claimed that Vance\u2019s marriage to an Indian American woman meant he \u201cdoesn\u2019t value his racial identity.\u201d In response, Vance denounced Fuentes, calling him a \u201cwhite supremacist\u201d \u2014 but that was all before the election.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump\u2019s 2024 inroads among voters of color<\/a>, including Indian Americans, shocked pundits who expected that his nativist rhetoric and policies would drive Black, Latino, and Asian voters toward the Democratic Party. Former White House adviser Steve Bannon even claimed<\/a> MAGA had become a multiracial, working-class coalition \u2014 and he wasn\u2019t entirely wrong. But in late 2024, as the GOP should have been taking a victory lap, two factions of the MAGA movement clashed over H-1B visas<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The debate scrambled political alliances, with Elon Musk \u2014 a promoter of the racist \u201cgreat replacement\u201d conspiracy theory<\/a> \u2014 arguing that foreign-born workers are essential to American innovation. Though Musk is an immigrant himself, his comments received far less vitriol than those made by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who said<\/a> H-1Bs are needed in part because American culture \u201chas venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.\u201d Critics pointed to Ramaswamy\u2019s comments as proof that Indian Americans \u2014 even those who, like him, were born in the United States \u2014 are incapable of assimilating. On X, Ramaswamy\u2019s opponents said that his comments were indicative of \u201cthinly veiled ethnic resentment\u201d and doubled down on their claims that the primary function of H-1B visas is to replace American workers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They decided there\u2019s no price to be paid when it comes to engaging in language that treats Indian immigrants as outsiders and not compatible with American culture<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Despite Musk\u2019s position on visas, it should come as no surprise that X has helped push anti-Indian rhetoric from the fringes to the forefront of conservative politics. Conversations that wouldn\u2019t seem out of place on 4chan or The Daily Stormer are now happening on a mainstream social media site with millions of users.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt really started after Elon\u2019s takeover of Twitter, and it went into full overdrive mode after the \u201924 election, in November, when Vivek joined DOGE,\u201d says Anang Mittal, a longtime conservative strategist who previously worked for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY). \u201cThat was the beginning of, \u2018Okay, it\u2019s open season on out-and-out racism.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mittal suspects that Republican politicians feel like they can entertain anti-Indian racism without losing much support among voters, in part because Indian Americans are such a small slice of the population. An estimated 5.2 million Indian Americans live in the United States, constituting just over 1.5 percent of the total US population. \u201cThey decided there\u2019s no price to be paid when it comes to engaging in language that treats Indian immigrants as outsiders and not compatible with American culture,\u201d says Mittal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Republicans\u2019 increasingly explicit anti-Indian sentiment may help cost them in the midterms. A February survey<\/a> by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that seven in 10 Indian Americans disapprove of Trump\u2019s second-term performance \u2014 but it also shows that Democrats have lost support among Indian Americans since 2020, and just 46 percent identify as Democrats today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These remarks have had real-world consequences far beyond the realm of electoral politics: Last week, authorities arrested a 19-year-old man who allegedly attempted a mass shooting<\/a> at a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois. Law enforcement reportedly seized weapons, ammunition, Nazi paraphernalia, and a gas canister with an anti-South Asian slur written on it, as well as a manifesto in which the alleged shooter fantasized about killing non-white people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The alleged shooter\u2019s manifesto echoed \u201ca lot of the narratives that you see online,\u201d says Bhatt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhen you spend months watching people make generalizations about your community, and question your loyalties, and somehow make the presumption that our presence in America is undesirable, you are painting a target on people\u2019s back.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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