Opinion

Lydia Polgreen

One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt

Indian immigrants in the United States have found success, and unexpected hostility.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

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Lydia Polgreen

By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Sugar Land, Texas

Dec. 29, 2025

It was a joyous day, the fulfillment of a quarter-century of hard work and relentless fund-raising. Srinivasachary Tamirisa, a retired doctor living in Sugar Land, Texas, beamed with pride as his dream — to erect a statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman on the grounds of a temple he had helped found — came to life.

A helicopter circled overhead, blanketing flower petals on the glittering likeness of the god, revered for his strength, selflessness and devotion to faith. Priests in white and saffron robes mounted a crane to anoint the 90-foot-tall statue and drape it with garlands of flowers. A crowd of hundreds gathered as both India’s national song, “Vande Mataram,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” were played, a perfect encapsulation of Indian Americans’ easy blending into the mores of their adopted home even as many maintained their own traditions.

But just outside the temple walls, dozens of conservative Christian protesters gathered, castigating what they called “a demon god.” Local right-wing politicians seized on the topic. “Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation,” a U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media.

ImagePeople mill around the base of a huge bronze-colored statue of a Hindu deity.

A 90-foot tall statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman stands on the grounds of a temple that has earned the enmity of conservative Christian protesters.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

Tamirisa, who emigrated to the United States from India as a young doctor 50 years ago, was stunned. He had built a life that seemed the epitome of the American ideal: a successful career as an OB-GYN, delivering about a dozen babies a month. He paid his taxes faithfully, raised his children in this tidy, affluent suburb of Houston, then sent them off to attend elite colleges and become doctors and investment bankers. He had proudly become a citizen. And this is how his adopted country repaid that devotion?

“I thought this was heaven on earth,” Tamirisa told me as we toured the temple grounds. Now, suddenly, his neighbors were taunting his faith and questioning his right to be an American. “The guys came here and said: This is a devil,” he told me. “This is not a devil; this is a guru, the teacher telling you to be fearless.”

These experiences have led him to question everything about his adopted home and wonder whether future generations of Indians should set their sights on a life in America. If he had his way, he’d return to India himself and live out his old age among old friends and family. But he’s staying to dote on his four grandchildren.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “Why am I here? I question that to myself.”

A man in saffron robes stands, holding his hands clasped in front of him.

Srinivasachary Tamirisa, a retired doctor in Sugar Land, Texas, helped found a Hindu temple.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

Amid an astonishing wave of anti-Indian animus, it’s a question many Indian Americans are asking. In its crudest form, mostly expressed on social media, this antipathy shows up as gutter racism and religious bigotry — an endless stream of invective declaring that Indians have low I.Q.s, worship devils, cheat their way into the country and commit terrible crimes. But it is fostered, in barely cloaked forms, by top Republican officials who accuse Indians of stealing American jobs.

“They engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers,” Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida referred to the H-1B visa program that allows highly skilled immigrants, many of them Indian tech workers, to come to the United States with their families as “chain migration run amok.” Many Indian Americans took umbrage when JD Vance, who is married to a Hindu daughter of Indian immigrants, expressed his hope that his wife would someday convert to Christianity.

It is a startling turn in one of the most successful migration experiments in modern history. Since 1965, when civil rights immigration law opened the United States to migrants from countries across the globe, hundreds of thousands of Indians have immigrated to the United States. No group has made a bigger success of its opportunity. Indian Americans’ median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans overall; about three-quarters of Indian American adults have at least a college degree and many work in high-status, well-paying professions in places like Houston, New York and Silicon Valley.

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A suburban street with houses in the background.

The median household income of Indian Americans surpasses that of white Americans. They have made lives in neighborhoods like this one, in Sugar Land, Texas.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

In public life, Indian Americans have rocketed to prominence. They have led iconic American companies like Google, Microsoft and Pepsi, and are major players in culture and science — several have won a Nobel Prize. They are a growing political force in both parties, too: Three major candidates in the 2024 presidential election were of Indian ancestry. After decades of voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, last year Indian Americans, like many immigrant groups, seemed to swing right, making them a crucial sliver in the fragile coalition that elected Donald Trump.

“I​​ndian Americans have really been, in many ways, the poster children for America’s legal skilled immigration regime,” Milan Vaishnav, the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has studied Indian Americans and grew up in Houston, told me. “It’s hard to think of other groups that have been as wildly successful as Indians in America.”

Now, all of a sudden, six decades of mutually beneficial migration are coming to a shuddering halt. Most Americans have quite positive views of Indian Americans. But the combination of anti-Indian rhetoric and government visa policies — not least the chaos that has enveloped the H-1B visa — has already had a powerful chilling effect. Indians last year became the largest contingent of foreign students at American universities, but this year arrivals of Indian students fell by 44 percent.

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A shopping center sign looms in the center, in front of darkened buildings.

The number of Indian students who come to the United States fell drastically this year.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

Over the past decade, migration has become the biggest political fault line in much of the rich world. Fights over whether and how to welcome migrants, or how brutally they might be repulsed, have led to a surge in support for far-right parties in many countries and helped propel Trump back to the White House. Throughout, much of the focus has been on refugees and asylum seekers from troubled, impoverished nations and those who cross borders without authorization. But increasingly, right-wing parties are taking aim at legal, highly skilled migration too.

In a way, this makes sense. Vance and other Trump administration officials blame illegal immigration for just about every difficulty Americans face — the housing shortage, unemployment, inflation, health insurance premiums and more. But Americans face their stiffest competition for jobs and homes from immigrants here legally. Because voluntary migration is such a rare and self-selecting phenomenon — over 96 percent of the world’s people live in the country of their birth — Americans are often competing against the best educated and most ambitious people from countries across the globe.

This is especially true for India, home to 1.4 billion people. It has a formidable tradition of elite science, engineering and medical education, accessible only to those who can ace a pitiless gantlet of extremely competitive tests. For decades, the United States has welcomed those graduates, who have contributed much to American prosperity and been rewarded for it with handsome salaries and comfortable lives in the suburban idylls that typify the American dream.

But as that dream feels increasingly out of reach for many young Americans, stoking resentment at perceived outsiders who are actually achieving it makes for good, if cynical, politics. The turn against highly skilled legal immigrants, especially those who worship differently and have darker skin, was perhaps an inevitable escalation of Trump’s anti-immigration movement.

For America, though, the cost may be high. The United States has been profoundly changed by Indians coming to the country. It stands to reason it will be changed by their not coming, too.

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Three-quarter portrait of a women looking to the side in a green dress.

Sai Sushma Pasupuleti was a star student in India. She started a doctoral program in electrical engineering at the University of Houston but now finds doors closing.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

For decades, Indian students with degrees in highly sought-after technical fields have followed a glide path to a life in the United States: win acceptance to a good American university, secure a student visa and, after graduating, find work at an American company. When Sai Sushma Pasupuleti arrived at the University of Houston in 2023 to pursue a doctorate in electrical engineering, that path was wide open.

Now, it is all but blocked. A couple of months ago, Pasupuleti attended a job fair at the university. She approached booth after booth, résumé in hand. But each representative asked one question: Are you a U.S. citizen? When she said she was not, they sent her away.

“I did a lot of hard work,” she said, crestfallen. “It’s crazy how they didn’t even look at my résumé.”

She had been a star student back home in Hyderabad, winning a prize for her master’s thesis at one of India’s prestigious institutes of technology. Her professors encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. abroad, something she had never considered because she assumed that she could not afford it. Her parents had divorced when she was a young child and her mother, who works in sales at a pharmaceutical company, raised her on her own.

“We are lower middle class,” she told me. “My mom struggled a lot, but she sent me to the best school. She tried to give me the best education, and she always believed that education is what is going to feed us.”

She had hoped to go to Germany, a leader in cutting-edge electrical engineering, but did not get a scholarship. She was offered scholarships to universities in both Britain and the United States. America, she said, had a special allure.

“Whoever goes to the U.S., the person would be shaped into a leader and a technical expert,” she said. “Anyone who has done a higher degree from America is considered very skilled worldwide.”

With a job and visa seeming out of reach, she has been focusing on commercializing her research. Along with her adviser and fellow students, she has been developing a smaller, more versatile version of a pulse power converter — a heavy, expensive device used in research, medical and military settings, that sends powerful and precise jolts of electricity. Together, they are trying to start a company. But even if they succeed in raising money, Pasupuleti may still struggle to get a work visa to remain in the United States.

“The place where I landed is like a shaky ground,” she said. “I would like to find some secure place.” Perhaps, she said, she could find a job in Europe.

She doesn’t regret the decision to come to America and said that her degree will be valuable wherever she goes. But given how much this country has invested in her education, it is puzzling that it seems determined to send her away. Three of her fellow Ph.D. students are also from elsewhere — two from China and one from Ivory Coast, Pasupuleti told me.

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A woman in the distance walks in front of a building facade, framed by tree trunks.

Pasupuleti does not regret coming to the United States for her degree but wonders now whether Europe might be a better bet for a job.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

That is not unusual. According to the National Science Foundation, foreign students have been awarded more engineering and computer science doctorates than have U.S. citizens and permanent residents for over two decades. Top programs usually include tuition and a stipend, so American universities are spending considerable sums educating engineers who may have no choice but to leave the country rather than build their careers in America.

“Obviously we’re all grateful for the scholarships, but if they don’t want us to work here,” Pasupuleti said, her voice trailing off. “I mean, I’m sure they have their reasons.”

As the world’s two largest democracies, the United States and India have had a surprisingly fraught relationship as nations. But as peoples, Americans and Indians have enjoyed a long, mutually fruitful engagement.

The Indian American writer Suketu Mehta describes this as a game of transcontinental Ping-Pong. First, the New England transcendentalists were inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads. Then, a young Indian lawyer in South Africa by the name of Mahatma Gandhi read Ralph Waldo Emerson, helping to inspire the movement for Indian independence. In turn, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced Martin Luther King Jr. during the American civil rights movement, which itself led to the opening of America to Indian immigrants, including Mehta and his parents.

“Every year since I came to this country in 1977, I felt more assured of my place in America,” Mehta told me. “And now for the first time, that’s been thrown into doubt.”

A number of Indian Americans in his circle have been applying for status as overseas citizens of India, which gives people of Indian descent the right to live permanently in India and a backup plan should things truly go awry in the United States. Racialization has come as a rude shock.

But Mehta also wondered whether Indian Americans had become a bit smug about their spectacular success in America over the past six decades, trusting that their wealth and status would shield them from the kind of bigotry that once barred them from entry and citizenship. Indian Americans, he said, tell themselves: “We are the richest, best educated people. We don’t commit crimes. We go to good schools. We came here legally. We’re not like the Mexicans.”

Mehta finds this exceptionalism both understandable and dangerous. The Indians who come to the United States are not just the most ambitious and educated. They also are mostly the beneficiaries of the durable hierarchies of caste, class and religion that stratify Indian life.

“If Indians are so great, what explains India?” he quipped.

India is changing, too. It is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, home to the world’s biggest population and an important consumer market. Given the demographic challenges the West faces, India will continue to be an important source of human talent. But it will increasingly become a consumer of it, too. In just the past few months, for example, American tech giants have announced a combined $67.5 billion in new investments in India. As foreign countries compete for opportunities, highly educated Indians will have options.

In time, it will be little wonder if a graduate from a top Indian university finds employment at home more appealing than the volatility of U.S. visa policy and the barrage of anti-Indian sentiment on offer here. One-fifth of all migrants worldwide are born in India. But despite the country’s many problems, Indians are unusually averse to leaving — only about 1 percent of Indians live outside India, a third of the global average.

Arguments in favor of migration tend to focus either on its economic benefits or its moral claim on the American psyche. But from the nation’s founding these two have been intertwined in ways both productive and confounding. Over the past year, as I’ve written about migration across the globe, I have often asked opponents of migration whether they would prefer to live in a country people flee from or flee toward. The answer, invariably, is the latter. The recent surge in support for immigration reflects, I suspect, that America’s status as the destination of choice for the world’s best minds is an intense source of pride.

It is also a source of strength. Trump clearly prefers the menacing snarl of hard power, but America’s openness to the world’s most ambitious people — and its unique ability to absorb and make use of human talent — has perhaps been its most potent form of soft power. Why try to defeat the world’s richest country when you might have the chance to join it and reap its ample rewards?

That is not the Trump administration’s way of thinking. For all the talk about abolishing D.E.I. in favor of merit, it seems to believe that for Americans to compete with the best of the world, merit must be redefined in nationalist terms, if not entirely set aside. Its National Security Strategy said so explicitly.

“Should merit be smothered, America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense and innovation will evaporate,” the document states. However, it continues, “we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding ‘global talent’ that undercuts American workers.” Trumpism seems to be seeking a form of talent autarky.

This is a radical change, and one that will surely leave the United States poorer, weaker and more isolated. I cannot help but detect in these nativist outbursts against Indian immigrants and their descendants a profound loss of confidence. The protesters repulsed by the towering Hanuman statue saw it as a threat to their culture, religion and traditions. But to me, that glittering hulk of alloyed metal symbolizes something else: the enduring magnetism of America’s promise, tarnished though it may be.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5815056&forum_id=2\u0026show=week#49546736)