Two years ago, University of Houston student Vasant Bhatt was doing everything he could to help Republicans regain power. He knocked doors for Sen. Ted Cruz’s reelection campaign and helped organize his community for Donald Trump, two victories he, like many other Republicans, celebrated in 2024. But this week, Bhatt did something unexpected: He voted for Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, and he publicly urged others to do the same.
Bhatt, whose father is a small-business owner, tells The Verge he was initially drawn to the Republican Party due to its economic principles. “The strong belief in individual liberty and limited government,” he says, led him to identify as a conservative. More recently, however, another aspect of his family’s experience has driven him away from the party. As an Indian American, Bhatt feels increasingly unwelcome in a party where racist rhetoric is becoming far too common.
“There’s isolated individuals, but I think there’s an ecosystem as well,” Bhatt says. He has gotten used to people telling him to go back to India, but recently, he’s noticed anti-Indian racism increasing in both frequency and intensity. He wasn’t surprised when prominent conservative commentators replied to his post implying he’s not a real American. The X account for the Waco Young Republicans accused him of voting “entirely based on his loyalty to a foreign people over Americans.”
Indian Americans are reliable voters, with about 70 percent of the voting-eligible population showing up to the polls in presidential election years. And there were signs that the electorate was moving to the right, albeit only slightly: The percentage of Indian American voters who lean Democrat dropped from 59 percent in 2020 to 55 percent four years later. About one-third of Indian Americans supported Trump in 2024 — by no means a majority, but still a sign their votes were up for grabs. Since then, however, they’ve become a favored target for racist self-proclaimed “heritage Americans.” Both fringe and mainstream conservatives have portrayed Indian Americans as stealing high-paying tech jobs from white workers and undermining American unity. Conservative commentator Chris Rufo — who rose to prominence by agitating against diversity efforts in public schools — even posted a video dissecting the so-called “Indian Question” in which he concluded that it’s “natural” for people to want to stick to their own kind. The right’s embrace of anti-Indian racism is now threatening to reverse Republicans’ recent gains with Indian American voters while promoting immigration restrictions that could shape the country for years to come.
Bhatt began to notice the shift shortly after Trump’s 2024 victory but says it has become especially intense in the run-up to the midterm elections. In September, Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted a picture of hundreds of University of Texas fans celebrating a football victory. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” French wrote, referring to the fact that many students in the foreground appeared to be of South Asian descent. Some Texas Republicans condemned French’s racism, but French stood by his comments, and others have defended him.
“Watching people like Jack Posobiec rationalize, excuse, minimize, and even prop up this rhetoric by defending folks like Bo French, I’m not really surprised,” says Bhatt.
A few weeks after French’s comments, Vice President JD Vance used his announcement that the Trump administration would be reducing some tech companies’ ability to hire foreign employees as an opportunity to call workers on H-1B visas “foreign indentured servants.” India’s Ministry of External Affairs called Vance’s comments “deeply offensive.”
Anti-Indian rhetoric has also translated into policy change. The Washington Post notes that Republican politicians became more willing to engage in attacks on legal immigrants — including Indian Americans — after Trump’s immigration crackdown led to a drastic decrease in unauthorized border crossings. Now that Trump appears to have “solved” the problem of illegal immigration by shutting down asylum at the border, and has unleashed ICE on immigrants living in the country, nativists have found a new target in H-1B workers, many of whom are Indian immigrants.
Since returning to office, Trump has raised the price of H-1B visas to upwards of $100,000 and waged a silent war on legal immigration, not only slashing the number of people who could legally come to the US but also sending naturalization rates plummeting. Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security now promote the idea of “remigration,” or forcibly returning immigrants to their countries of origin regardless of their legal status. The White House has even celebrated the fact that legal immigration has fallen since Trump’s return to office. These policies are animated by a belief, prevalent among a faction of Republicans led by White House adviser Stephen Miller, that the problem with immigration isn’t whether people come to America legally, but what types of people come here. A growing chorus of “heritage Americans” see all non-white immigrants as incapable of assimilating to American culture, and they’ve selected Indians as their primary target.
“I spent years within conservative politics, and I realized that my convictions don’t mean anything if I’m not going to be regarded as an American, or if I’m going to be regarded as a second-class citizen,” says Bhatt.
Signs of the Republican Party’s anti-Indian turn have been percolating for years. Shortly after Trump selected Vance as his running mate, far-right streamer Nick Fuentes declared a “groyper war” on the Trump-Vance campaign. Fuentes, who is Mexican American, claimed that Vance’s marriage to an Indian American woman meant he “doesn’t value his racial identity.” In response, Vance denounced Fuentes, calling him a “white supremacist” — but that was all before the election.
Trump’s 2024 inroads among voters of color, including Indian Americans, shocked pundits who expected that his nativist rhetoric and policies would drive Black, Latino, and Asian voters toward the Democratic Party. Former White House adviser Steve Bannon even claimed MAGA had become a multiracial, working-class coalition — and he wasn’t entirely wrong. But in late 2024, as the GOP should have been taking a victory lap, two factions of the MAGA movement clashed over H-1B visas.
The debate scrambled political alliances, with Elon Musk — a promoter of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — arguing that foreign-born workers are essential to American innovation. Though Musk is an immigrant himself, his comments received far less vitriol than those made by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who said H-1Bs are needed in part because American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Critics pointed to Ramaswamy’s comments as proof that Indian Americans — even those who, like him, were born in the United States — are incapable of assimilating. On X, Ramaswamy’s opponents said that his comments were indicative of “thinly veiled ethnic resentment” and doubled down on their claims that the primary function of H-1B visas is to replace American workers.
They decided there’s no price to be paid when it comes to engaging in language that treats Indian immigrants as outsiders and not compatible with American culture
Despite Musk’s position on visas, it should come as no surprise that X has helped push anti-Indian rhetoric from the fringes to the forefront of conservative politics. Conversations that wouldn’t seem out of place on 4chan or The Daily Stormer are now happening on a mainstream social media site with millions of users.
“It really started after Elon’s takeover of Twitter, and it went into full overdrive mode after the ’24 election, in November, when Vivek joined DOGE,” says Anang Mittal, a longtime conservative strategist who previously worked for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “That was the beginning of, ‘Okay, it’s open season on out-and-out racism.’”
Mittal suspects that Republican politicians feel like they can entertain anti-Indian racism without losing much support among voters, in part because Indian Americans are such a small slice of the population. An estimated 5.2 million Indian Americans live in the United States, constituting just over 1.5 percent of the total US population. “They decided there’s no price to be paid when it comes to engaging in language that treats Indian immigrants as outsiders and not compatible with American culture,” says Mittal.
Republicans’ increasingly explicit anti-Indian sentiment may help cost them in the midterms. A February survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that seven in 10 Indian Americans disapprove of Trump’s second-term performance — but it also shows that Democrats have lost support among Indian Americans since 2020, and just 46 percent identify as Democrats today.
These remarks have had real-world consequences far beyond the realm of electoral politics: Last week, authorities arrested a 19-year-old man who allegedly attempted a mass shooting at a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois. Law enforcement reportedly seized weapons, ammunition, Nazi paraphernalia, and a gas canister with an anti-South Asian slur written on it, as well as a manifesto in which the alleged shooter fantasized about killing non-white people.
The alleged shooter’s manifesto echoed “a lot of the narratives that you see online,” says Bhatt.
“When you spend months watching people make generalizations about your community, and question your loyalties, and somehow make the presumption that our presence in America is undesirable, you are painting a target on people’s back.”