Episode 12

full
Published on:

8th Jan 2025

The Indians Are Coming!

Suchitra, Bhakti and Madhuri start off the new year with a focus on the crop of Indian Americans who support Donald Trump, MAGA and have emerged as shamelessly racist and anti-migrant despite their own immigrant background. A recent feud between Trump, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy over the topic of H1-B visas and who gets to migrate into the US tech empire brought out all the racist rhetoric into the open. The hosts go over the parade of conservative Indians of Hindu and upper-caste backgrounds (Vivek Ramaswamy, Sriram Krishnan, Kash Patel) that have risen to power in recent years, many of whom will likely have official positions in Trump's cabinet. They discuss the shift from the language of "model minority" and "skilled" labor to the caste-inflected language of "merit." The ascendancy of male, Hindu, upper-caste and tech-centric Indians in the US has only blazed a negative trail for immigrants seeking visas and citizenship. These wealthy and powerful men have paradoxically shrunk the public's understanding of immigration, visas and have furthered the racist and hierarchical language of "skilled" vs "unskilled." The discussion also exposes just how badly the media covers migration and remains entrenched in a white and colonial understanding of borders, nation-states and foreigners.

Key takeaways

-The Indians are not coming, they are already here. And it is an ugly, MAGA mess. 

- The ongoing feud between Ramaswamy, Musk and Trump unleashes anti-migrant racism and normalizes the public's view that immigrants snatch jobs from American citizens. 

- Indian Americans who support Trump are likely to make the already arduous and expensive H1B visa process even more difficult. 

- Indian migration to the US is grown exponentially in the last two decades and primarily includes privileged, educated, upper-caste and upper-class Hindus.

- The tech-centric, capitalist and conservative Indian Americans make the caste-inflected language of "merit" pervasive and also entrench hierarchies of "skilled" vs "unskilled" labor. 

-The media covers migration through a white and colonial gaze, and refuses to analyze the draconian nature of the nation-state when it comes to borders, policing, and anti-migrant racism. 

-These debates and feuds between powerful Indian immigrants leave a lot of collateral damage in their wake. Less privileged immigrants from all over the world are the ones who pay the price when policies and process are put through the wringer. 

Hosted by Suchitra Vijayan, Bhakti Shringarpure, and Madhuri Sastry

A podcast by The Polis Project https://www.thepolisproject.com/

References:

World Economic Forum. “Indian Diaspora Hits Record-Breaking Numbers" https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/india-has-the-world-s-biggest-diaspora-here-s-where-its-emigrants-live/

India's Diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history https://www.economist.com/international/2023/06/12/indias-diaspora-is-bigger-and-more-influential-than-any-in-history 

Ari Hoffman and Jeanne Batalova, "Indian Immigrants in the United States," Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indian-immigrants-united-states

Trump sides with tech bosses in Maga fight over immigrant visas https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyv7gxp02yo

Ann Coulter & Vivek Ramaswamy interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUa1KkxyOmA

Next Episode All Episodes Previous Episode

Listen for free

Show artwork for It's Not You, It's The Media

About the Podcast

It's Not You, It's The Media
Resist media gaslighting
It's Not You, It's The Media! unpacks the ways that the media manipulates narratives and makes you question your reality. You're being gaslighted. Suchitra Vijayan, Bhakti Shringarpure and Madhuri Sastry eviscerate the propaganda, set the record straight and offer moral clarity.

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her first book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is the co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023) which offers a lens into today's India through the lived experiences of political prisoners.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and editor. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018) and most recently, Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).

Madhuri Sastry is a former lawyer, specializing in international and human rights law. She was the publisher of Guernica Magazine. Her political writing, cultural criticism, interviews and essays have appeared in several publications including The Nation, Guernica, Slate, Bitch and New York Magazine. She is on the editorial board at the Polis Project.