(RNS) — Not long ago, Elon Musk was not alone among U.S. business leaders in arguing that the H-1B visa program — aimed at allowing highly skilled foreign specialists to work in the United States, most often in tech — was like drafting foreign basketball wizards to play on American teams. “This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA,” Musk wrote on X in December.
Some who see immigrants as a threat have also promoted the idea that Indian immigrants are all elite workers.
In a January interview, Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson told Religion News Service that H-1B workers will “rise to the top in the tech industry, many of them, which is a highly influential industry. Consequently, what you’re doing is you’re bringing in people who are not acculturated to the culture of the United States, and putting them in a position of shaping that culture.”
Many prominent Indian Americans have helped paint this profile of the model immigrant, pointing to the outsized contribution Indian immigrants make to the economy, as well as culture and politics. Even President Donald Trump in his first term celebrated the “numerous Americans of Indian and Southeast Asian heritage who fulfill critical roles across my administration.”
At more than 5 million people, Indians are the second-largest immigrant population in the country and the highest earning and most educated, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center.
But the “model minority” lens, advocates say, not only excludes a growing number of immigrants from India, but is creating a divide between the more financially successful transplants and working-class immigrants who, like others fleeing poverty or discrimination in their countries, come to find a better life in the United States.
They are taxi or truck drivers, small-business owners and wage workers raising families with the American dream from New York and New Jersey to Texas and California.
Now Hindu activists are calling attention to the plight of those who come “the hard way.” Vrinda Jagota, a writer in Brooklyn and organizer for the nonprofit Hindus for Human Rights, said that because many of her co-religionists benefit from the model minority myth, they “don’t want to see themselves in solidarity with other Black and brown people” from other South Asian countries, Mexico or elsewhere.
“Often the people who are on H-1B visas, who speak English and who are working in a certain proximity to whiteness are the ones who get to shape a narrative of the diaspora,” said Jagota. “But I think that this leads to a lot of erasure of working-class communities. I think their trauma is erased.”
A large portion of these immigrants have come in the last decade, some traveling illegally from the Indian states of Punjab, Gujurat and Uttar Pradesh and seeking asylum on arrival. According to recent reporting by PBS News, nearly 150,000 people emigrate from India to the U.S. each year. An estimated 200,000 who are undocumented are believed to be in the U.S.
Many Hindu Americans feel it is high time to build solidarity with those who come legally or illegally.
“People may be reluctant to talk about migration from India that falls outside that narrative, because they feel it reflects poorly on the broader Indian immigrant community,” said Akanksha Kalra, an immigration attorney in Philadelphia. “But the truth is, these migrant stories are also a part of the larger ‘Indian immigrant’ picture.
“It may also touch on class divides, as some may feel uncomfortable to openly acknowledge the presence of Indian migrants who arrive in the U.S. through other means, or the desperation that makes them risk debt, danger and an uncertain future.”
A Republic of India passport. (Photo by Sourav Debnath/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Two-thirds of Indian Americans say they are Hindu or feel closely connected to Hinduism, and the majority of all Hindus in America are immigrants themselves, but the reluctance to talk about working-class immigrants is preventing a more robust response from Hindu temples and other faith organizations, advocates say.
Hindus for Human Rights’ latest initiative, “The Stranger Is God,” comes from the Hindu teaching of Atithi Devo Bhava — “be one for whom the stranger is God.” Hindu mandirs, or temples, say HfHR advocates, can and should function as sanctuaries.
So far, HfHR has worked with 10 mandirs across the New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, where a high number of immigrants, many of Indian descent from Caribbean countries, live in fear of immigration authorities.
Though no U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have been reported at Hindu temples, “this constant anxiety about ICE operating and communities being under siege takes a huge toll on us,” said psychologist and activist Ishwar Bridgelal.
“Almost all Hindus are either immigrants themselves or people who are of immigrant origin, right?” said Bridgelal. “A temple is not only a potential site for Know Your Rights trainings about immigration, but is a site where people come together and they heal.”
In recent months, members of the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese Hindu community in Pennsylvania have come under scrutiny by federal immigration officers, despite coming to the U.S. under a legal refugee resettlement program. More than 65 of them who committed crimes ranging from DUIs to domestic assault more than a decade ago have been detained in the past year, and 25 were deported back to Bhutan, where they had suffered religious and ethnic discrimination.
Other Indian Hindus have either misunderstood the refugees’ plight or been apathetic, including one Hindu politician who said that those who did the crimes “deserved the punishment.”
In recent months, however, the divide between “elite” H-1B recipients, 70% of whom are Indians, and less advantaged immigrants has begun to collapse. Amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, Silicon Valley executives, politicians and conservative Christian pastors are challenging the program’s value, saying “too many” immigrants have been granted the temporary visa.
“America does not need more visas for people from India,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk posted on Monday (Sept. 1). “Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.”
Last week, Trump, who has criticized the H-1B program since he began running for president in 2015, announced a major overhaul of the H-1B visa process. The U.S. Department of State will soon require all applicants for temporary visas like the H-1B to appear for an in-person interview, so those who attain a visa through the program’s lottery can be more fully vetted.
This pressure may be bringing South Asians of all faiths and social status together. Salman Bhojani, the first South Asian and first Muslim elected to the Texas Legislature, put out a viral social media campaign earlier this year in Gujurati and Urdu, the languages of Gujurat and Pakistan, respectively, to tell his constituents what to do in case of ICE’s presence at their homes or workplaces.
Salman Bhojani. (Courtesy photo)
The videos were well-received by many in his state who are from South Asian countries and own convenience stores, hotels or gas stations, said Bhojani. Many told him, “‘Hey, I voted for Trump, I had no idea that he would go after legal immigrants,’” said Bhojani.
“A lot of times, people have paid a lot of money to attorneys to legalize themselves, like my family, who has paid $25,000 to legally come in this country and do all that paperwork,” said Bhojani, who is from Pakistan. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be mad at illegal immigrants that are coming in. Everybody’s coming and making our country better by putting in their heart and effort.”
Demonizing immigrants, legal or illegal, “is not the solution for America,” he said. (In recent weeks, state GOP chairman Bo French has targeted Bhojani on social media, calling on him to be deported.)
For Jagota, who is Indo-Caribbean, the question of accepting illegal immigrants into the South Asian immigrant story is similarly an easy one from a Hindu standpoint.
“When we say ‘namaste,’ when we pray, when we meet someone, we are praying to the God in them too. As Hindus, we acknowledge that the God, the divine in us, is also in everyone else,” she said. “I think if you see God in everyone, you see yourself in them. You see their struggle as yours too.”
