The American Dream, Indian Style

Reference library · 1000 words

Indian Americans are now one of the largest and most visible immigrant-origin communities in the United States, numbering well over four million people. They are also, by most surveys, the highest-earning origin group in the country and among the most highly educated. That profile is often read as evidence of some cultural predisposition to success. The truer explanation is a matter of policy: for six decades American immigration law selected, from a country of a billion people, precisely those with degrees, English and professional credentials. The community is the product of a filter, and understanding the filter explains most of what is distinctive about it.

The earliest Indian migration to the United States was nothing like this. From around 1900 several thousand men, mostly Punjabi Sikhs, arrived through the Pacific ports and took work in lumber mills in Washington and Oregon and on farms in California's Central Valley, where the town of Yuba City still has one of the oldest gurdwaras in North America. They faced riots, exclusion campaigns and laws barring aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land, which some circumvented by marrying Mexican American women and holding property in their names. In 1917 Congress created a barred zone that excluded Indian immigration almost entirely. In 1923 the Supreme Court held in United States v Bhagat Singh Thind that although Indians might be classified as Aryan by the anthropology of the day, they were not white in the common understanding, and therefore could not naturalise. Some who had already become citizens were denaturalised. It was in this atmosphere that Indian revolutionaries founded the Ghadar Party on the American west coast in 1913 to organise against British rule from abroad.

The doors that opened

Two pieces of legislation changed everything. The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 restored the right to naturalise and allowed a token quota. Far more important was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origins quota system that had privileged northern Europe and replaced it with preferences for family reunification and for occupational skills. Indian doctors, engineers and scientists began arriving in numbers through the 1960s and 1970s, many of them graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the state medical colleges, institutions the Indian taxpayer had funded. The Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa for specialty occupations, and as the American software industry expanded, Indian engineers and the Indian outsourcing firms that supplied them became the largest single source of H-1B holders by a wide margin. A parallel and quite different stream ran through the motel business, in which Gujarati families, many of them bearing the surname Patel and some of them twice migrants expelled from East Africa, bought small roadside properties, lived on site, worked as a family and reinvested, until they came to own a large share of American budget lodging.

The results are conspicuous at the top of American corporate life. Satya Nadella became chief executive of Microsoft in 2014, Sundar Pichai of Google in 2015, Arvind Krishna of IBM in 2020, and Shantanu Narayen has led Adobe since 2007. In politics the pioneer was Dalip Singh Saund, elected to the House of Representatives from California in 1957, the first Asian American member of Congress. Later came governors Bobby Jindal in Louisiana and Nikki Haley in South Carolina, and in 2021 Kamala Harris, whose mother emigrated from Chennai, became vice president. The Scripps National Spelling Bee has been won by Indian American children in a run so long it has become a cultural talking point in itself, and the network of mentors, regional bees and study systems behind it is an instructive small-scale model of how immigrant communities compound advantage.

The queue, and the parts of the picture that get left out

The most painful structural feature of Indian migration to America is the green card backlog. American law caps the number of employment-based permanent residence visas issued each year and adds a rule that no single country of birth may take more than seven per cent of the total in a category. Because that percentage is the same for Iceland as for India, and because Indian demand is enormous, the employment-based queues for Indian nationals have stretched into decades. People live for many years on temporary status, their ability to change jobs constrained by their employer's sponsorship, their spouses often barred from working, and their children at risk of ageing out of dependent status at twenty one and losing their place entirely. Proposals to remove the per-country cap have passed one chamber of Congress at various times without becoming law. The result is a class of long-term residents who pay tax, own homes and raise American children while remaining permanently provisional.

The picture also flattens real internal differences. Alongside physicians and software architects are taxi and rideshare drivers, convenience store clerks, restaurant workers, undocumented arrivals and elderly parents on dependent visas without health coverage. Religion, region and language divide the community as much as they unite it, and organisations claiming to speak for Indian Americans frequently do not. Caste has become an open controversy: a discrimination lawsuit filed by California regulators against Cisco Systems in 2020 brought allegations of caste bias in Silicon Valley into mainstream view, several American universities have added caste to their non-discrimination policies, Seattle's city council voted in 2023 to ban caste discrimination, and a similar California bill was vetoed. Whether caste protection is a necessary safeguard or an unfair stigmatisation of an entire community is argued fiercely within the diaspora itself, and there is no consensus in sight.

Meanwhile the direction of travel has begun to change. Some engineers and academics return to Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Gurugram for opportunities that did not exist a generation ago, and many maintain careers in both countries. What was once described as brain drain now looks more like a two-way circulation of people, capital and ideas, in which the same family may hold an American passport, an Indian property, and a boarding pass booked for both.

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