Indian-Americans test the waters in run-up to US primaries

Luv Puri

Journalist and Author

THE contest for the primaries is hotting up a year ahead of the US presidential election. A few Indian-Americans are vying to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate.

Indian-Americans, with a population of four million, account for nearly 1.3 per cent of the US population. In the past decade, the US Congress reportedly has had five Indian-Americans. Former South Carolina Governor and US Permanent Representative to the UN Nikki Randhawa Haley is in the race to become the Republican nominee. She has a proven record in governance.

The spotlight, however, is on 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who founded a successful biotech startup. Flush with money, a Midwest upbringing and Ivy League credentials, Ramaswamy has been profiled by leading media establishments. There is an element of exaggeration in terms of his narrative, though he has been impactful as he has a good understanding of the target audience and their soft spots.

Ramaswamy’s messaging may be anathema to the larger Indian community in the US or other minority groups, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, as he speaks against diversity in workplaces, though cleverly adding that he favours diverse ideas. In a profile on him in The New Yorker, the author noted, “To Ramaswamy, such corporate do-gooderism — and especially environmental, social and governance investing, known as ESG — is a smoke screen designed to distract from the less virtuous things that companies do to make money.” He has proposed a constitutional amendment that would require citizens aged between 18 and 24 years to pass a civics test in order to vote. This is again cunning messaging, keeping in mind the disdain middle-aged Republican voters have for the younger population, which is largely Democrat.

But none of the Indian-American contenders stands a chance against former President Donald Trump when it comes to getting the Republican Party nomination. Still, these trends have their own importance in the US landscape as to why Indian-Americans, who usually vote for the Democrats, are gaining spotlight in the Republican Party.

This goes against the truism that the Democratic Party, with its progressive ideals, is a natural party for minority groups, who are victims of majoritarian politics and its consequent discriminatory policies. One needs to pay attention to particular aspects of migration of Indians to the US and the strata they are coming from. The first phase of migration of Indians, prominently from Punjab, started in the early years of the 20th century through the modern tech hub of San Francisco. The immigrants, marginal in number due to legal restrictions for Asians, looked for railroad, lumber or agricultural jobs. Even Congressman Dalip Singh Saund, who had got his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1924, had to work as a farmer as he was denied citizenship till 1949. Born in Amritsar, he later became the first Asian-American, the first Indian-American and the first Sikh to be elected to the US Congress, from California in 1956 on the Democratic Party ticket.

Then there is a pool of Indian-Americans who are the children of a very successful grouping who migrated after the immigration Bill was signed by then President Lyndon B Johnson on October 3, 1965, which removed stipulations on migration from Asian countries. This enabled highly educated Indians to study and work in the US. Many of them went there on scholarships. Journalist Anita Raghavan, in her book The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund, made the expression ‘generation twice blessed’ famous as she described this group of immigrants. This group benefited from both the relaxation of US immigration laws and the enormous investment that India made in education following Independence, particularly in research and engineering institutes.

The post-1995 migration was triggered by a sudden explosion in the demand for technological workers, including the Y2K migration project, coupled with an interest in India’s emerging markets, which opened avenues for many finance professionals as well. Equipped with a strong background in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and a functional knowledge of the English language, nearly 75 per cent of the H-1B non-immigrant visa programme applicants came from India and many who got the visa became American citizens in a decade or so. A number of them, who migrated after 2000 or in the past 10 years, are permanent residents and in the process of acquiring citizenship.

Given the peculiarities of migration, the trend of Indian-Americans being represented in both parties will further solidify as more and more get citizenship. The struggle of other minority groups is not reflected in the lives of many relatively younger Indian-Americans, who were born to highly educated first-generation Indian-American parents. Backed by quality education, timing and the available ecosystem, the younger cohort has struck success in many financially lucrative professional fields.

Some from the Generation Z or the Millennial generation will support policies such as lower income tax and a private healthcare system, and there may also be a general antipathy towards welfarism, unlike other minority groups — which is more or less the present-day mantra of the Republican Party. Indian-American political affiliations may not strictly be a derivative of our understanding of politics of other minority groups in the US. In a nutshell, relatively richer Indian-Americans, as their number becomes bigger, may reflect the current US political landscape, which is more or less evenly divided between the Democrats and the Republicans.

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