The Indian-American Immigration Debate

Three theses on assimilation, immigration, and culture

In 2019, I volunteered on a campaign to stop Washington State’s Initiative 1000, which would have legalized racial discrimination in employment, college admissions, and government contracting. On one side: the state’s Democratic machine, left-wing NGOs, progressive media, and major corporations. On the other: a small band of conservatives and mostly non-ideological Asian Americans who opposed the measure as discrimination operating under the guise of “diversity.”

Despite being vastly outspent, our campaign won. Washington State voters upheld the standard of colorblind equality by a margin of 21,000 votes. It was a grassroots campaign that relied on earned media, word-of-mouth, and behind-the-scenes organizing.

At the victory gala, one Chinese-American man approached me and showed me his worn hands. He explained that he had worked in commercial freezers for 15 years to give his child a chance at the American Dream. The freezers were so cold that they had burned off his fingerprints.

I’ve been thinking about that campaign this week as a fierce debate about Indian immigration has raged through the discourse. The inciting incident was an X post last month by Bo French, a Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, who wrote that a group of Indian-American students cheering on the University of Texas football team represented a “problem.”

The post was a gift to two groups: the racialist Left and the racialist Right. The racialist Left has long tried to convince Indian Americans that they are an oppressed group that must unite with the intersectional coalition to overthrow “whiteness.” The racialist Right insists that people of Indian descent are an eternal Other who will never become Americans.

These two lies are mirror images of each other. Both factions have sought to reduce the discussion to rounds of mutual recrimination. That might serve their short-term interests, but it will do nothing to help the broad swath of Americans—of all racial and ethnic groups—caught in the middle.

I see three great questions in this conversation: assimilation, immigration, and culture. The first is the easiest. As the young men cheering on the Longhorns show, Indian Americans have demonstrated a strong capacity for assimilation. As a group, they have high levels of education, income, family stability, and entrepreneurialism. Many would-be Indian immigrants also have a fluency with Anglo-American culture and a strong ability for integrating into professional-managerial institutions.

The second question is immigration. The key point to recognize is that immigration is a nonlinear phenomenon. There is an enormous advantage to bringing in the most talented people from around the world. But as more and more people come, the cost-benefit ratio necessarily shifts. Whatever the skill level or country of origin, mass immigration always carries a risk of increasing cultural tensions, balkanization, nepotism, and dislocation. The greater the scale and speed, the greater the challenge of assimilation.

In recent years, many Americans have felt anxious about mass immigration because of its unprecedented scale, speed, and cultural difference. There are cities in Michigan that are run by Islamic migrants and where anti-Semitism is rife. There are cities in Texas that are now 20, 30, or 40 percent foreign-born, where ethnic enclaves are making assimilation harder. And economically, Americans increasingly compete for jobs with immigrants, many of whom have come here illegally or through legal but broken systems. These are policy choices, and it is perfectly legitimate for Americans to demand different ones.

The third question is about culture. Every immigrant group brings a particular constellation of values, habits, and norms that must be absorbed and negotiated over time. While something like the sharia culture of the Islamic world provides an acute contrast, the high-stakes testing cultures of countries like India and China entail more subtle tradeoffs. The upside is obvious: rewards for competition, hard work, and technical accomplishment. But there is also a hidden downside: brutal “grind” routines, universal zero-sum competition, immense pressure to conform, widespread cheating rings, distortions to family formation, depression, and suicide—problems increasingly being recognized in Asia itself.

The American approach is different. We should use tests to identify natural talent, reward those who work hard, and judge individuals without regard to race. But this does not mean that we should accept a Chinese-style regime of educational formation, high-stakes testing culture, and state-managed life trajectories as a superior form of “meritocracy.” America is an expansive country, and we should not collapse our system to a single dimension. We need both the valedictorian and the football captain; the math nerd and the prom queen; the software engineers and the artists, soldiers, statesmen, pioneers, farmers, and poets, all representing deep American archetypes.

The pervasive question is how we integrate new groups into the collective American ethos. Historically, America has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for assimilation. Today, however, we have the highest foreign-born population share in our history, so this project requires special prudence. I believe the best path forward is to slow down the flow of immigration to match our capacity to assimilate newcomers, to focus on building a shared national identity, and to initiate an honest debate about what kinds of institutions we want in America.

It won’t be easy. The racialist factions on both sides would prefer to keep us locked in a cycle of outrages. We should resist this temptation. As I learned in the successful campaign to stop left-wing racialism in Washington State, it’s possible to build a winning coalition of people who set aside ethnic factionalism and work together for the common good of America.