In early October, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, went for a classic “politician on the stump” move: He picked up a kid. Or at least he tried to. Ramaswamy fumbled the boy a bit, producing a clip that quickly went viral on social media. 

The next day, Ramaswamy posted a picture of himself with his son in his arms on social media. It was a cute retort. But many of the responses were ugly — racist attacks against Ramaswamy that drew on anti-Indian stereotypes.

It was the latest example of a broader shift on the right, where Indian Americans and Indian immigrants have become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger.

“The people who had negative stereotypes about Indians in their mind said, ‘Hey, look, the guy can’t even pick up a kid…he can’t even act like a normal American family man,’” freelance journalist Zaid Jilani told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Jilani, who recently wrote about the surge in anti-Indian racism for Vox, joined the podcast for a conversation about how he sees the bigotry as rooted in status envy, how Indian Americans and Indian immigrants are responding, and his surprisingly hopeful outlook for the future. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

American racism is very interesting, always has been. And there is a type that says, immigrants are dirty, they come here, they’re uneducated, they leach off the government, they’re taking our resources. 

The stereotype of Indian immigrants to America and Indian Americans is people who go to college, people who often have advanced degrees, people who often live in nice neighborhoods, make good money, are family-values people. 

Why do you think these values that seem as if they mesh with what Republicans want are so triggering to people these days? Is it just yes, but they’re brown?

I think that is a component of it. I spoke to one Indian American advocate who told me that Indians and South Asians more broadly are visible minorities, right? If you think about other minorities who are highly successful, that’s not always the case. 

For instance, I think that Jewish Americans have been known since the late 20th century as being a successful minority group, but they’re not necessarily highly visible. You can’t always identify someone. If [Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate] Bo French saw a bunch of white people in the stadium with the Longhorns, I’m not sure he would be picking out who’s Protestant, who’s Catholic, who’s Jewish. But with Indian Americans, they are highly visible.

That being said, I think you have to think about where Indian Americans are in society and the kind of feelings that can create among everyone else. If you look, for instance, at Silicon Valley, the major tech companies, Microsoft, Google — the head of [Microsoft’s] Xbox division is an Indian American woman now.

You have a group of people who I think are in many ways a very micro minority — we’re talking about 1 percent to 2 percent of the United States — visibly rising into so many positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks. White people generally run the Fortune 500, white folks run the universities, white folks are the most successful doctors and engineers. And that was true for the 20th century. 

But when you start seeing a much larger influx of Asian immigrants, starting with liberalization of immigration laws in the ’60s, but also when there was a rapid growth of the technology sector in the early 2000s, you start to understand a little bit more where the resentment comes from because it’s more, I would say, analogically similar to antisemitism than it is to the racism that Mexican Americans face or the racism that Black Americans face. 

“It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.”

It’s not that Indian Americans are necessarily being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally, so on and so forth. It’s more that they’re being seen as a status threat to a lot of particularly middle-class Americans, people who want their kids to rise to the top of their school, who want their kids to have the corner office. They want their kids to be able to get the most prestigious positions. 

I think in the minds of a lot of these people, not only now does their kid have to compete with all the other normal white kids in their community, they have to compete against the entire world. It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.

When you talked to Indian Americans for this piece, what did you hear from them that surprised you?

Probably the most surprising thing was how much pragmatism they responded to all of this with. Nine times out of 10, when you have stories about racism, the victims of racism are outraged — understandably and justifiably outraged. Nobody wants to be mistreated. Nobody wants to be denigrated. They certainly don’t want to see restrictions on the right to immigration, or other things to limit their numbers, which is the end point of a lot of this.

At the same time, I think a lot of the people I spoke to were very upfront. They’re like, “Hey, look, we have found a lot of success in America. We got the golden ticket to be able to come here, for our kids to study here, to be able to really seek these opportunities, but we understand what’s happening in the economy. We understand there’s a lot of people who are struggling and then they see us rising to the top of all these organizations. They see us with our kind of well-ensconced place in the economy. And I think it’s important for us not to flaunt our success that much.” At least a couple people said something to that respect. They almost empathize with the people who were hating on them.

It struck me as such a classic immigrant pragmatism that you see from the first or second wave of immigrants: people who realize that they are newcomers to a society or maybe their parents were newcomers to a society, and that there is a certain level of grappling they have to do with, “Hey, how can we continue to have success? How can we continue to grind and resist this racism, but also not rub it in people’s faces that we’re doing well because the more they do that, the tougher it can be?”

A number brought up Vivek Ramaswamy in the sense that Vivek happened to go on social media and talk about what he felt like were deficiencies in American culture when it comes to studying, when it comes to working hard.

I think that in bringing that up, they were saying that that wasn’t particularly helpful because whatever positive aspects there may be to Indian immigrant culture, we shouldn’t talk about them in ways that denigrate other people because that’s obviously going to rub people the wrong way.

You’re making the point that some of the surge in anti-Indian racism on the right is about status anxiety. I was listening to this podcast that Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman did. These are two influential right-wing activists. They called it “The Indian Question” — a lot of people’s eyebrows shot up — and they seem to be making the argument that it is about status anxiety. 

They also were making less coherent arguments about how it’s un-American to study for the spelling bee, which is what South Asian kids do, and that white kids are more American because they play football, then they go to a party and get drunk, and then they get 1,500 on the SAT. 

I’m not saying any of this makes sense. I’m saying it was fascinating. I’m assuming you watched that exchange. What did you make of that?

There’s a certain level of coping mechanism being deployed there in the sense that they are trying to explain the success of Indian Americans as a deficiency: “Maybe they’re getting to the top schools, but that’s because they’re shut in all day studying.”

But it’s not really true that Indian Americans are necessarily cloistered into unhealthy habits. They’re actually finding success across society. For instance, I’ve tutored kids for five, six years. I just really enjoy working with kids. And something you’ll find with a lot of the Indian American kids, they are actually getting increasingly well-rounded. 

Part of that is because you have to, to have success, to get college admissions and so on and so forth. They almost always play sports. They’re involved in extracurriculars. You’re seeing a lot more Indian Americans go into the arts, into cultural fields, into Hollywood. I think that’s actually a very normal path for immigrants.

I think the first or second wave of immigrants has to be very pragmatic. They have to keep their heads down. They have to grind, study, and their parents encourage them to do the same thing. Indian American parents are always like, “You got to be a doctor. You got to be an engineer. Don’t be foolish and try to be a journalist or go to Hollywood.”

But as they establish themselves, as they build nest eggs, they have a little more breathing room, and so they can do different things. I know that Christopher Rufo, for instance, is an Italian American, and I believe I read one time that he even speaks Italian at home because he really values that culture so much and he wants to raise his kids in that. The first wave of Italian immigrants were no different than that. They cloistered into a few sectors where they felt they could find success that was necessary for their integration into the economy and to get their footing. But now we don’t think of Italian Americans as stereotyped into just a few parts of the country or a few parts of society — we barely notice, unless maybe you notice from someone’s name that there even are Italian Americans. 

What they’re describing about Indian Americans is very normal. It’s actually very normal for first waves of immigrants to cluster in a few areas and then they spread themselves out as they’re able to get that a little bit of breathing room and room to ground to stand on.

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.”

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.”