The Hidden Privilege Behind the ‘Indian-American Dream’

By Ramya Vijaya

With Kamala Harris and Usha Vance, the second-generation India immigrant wife of the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance also in the spotlight, the myth of the ‘model minority’ has begun to surface once again—including in the pages of this paper. In his  recent July 16th commentary piece ‘J.D Vance and the Indian-American Dream’, Tunku Varadarajan claims that Indian-Americans have achieved significant success and upward socioeconomic mobility entirely through their own hard work, and that their success negates the notion that racial discrimination and systemic inequalities are deeply embedded in American society.  These contentions however fail to stand up to basic scrutiny. Rather than succeeding “entirely on their own steam” as Varadarajan claims, many Indian immigrants come from at least a middle-class background and bring various layers of accumulated privilege with them. Moreover, as I have described in my two books on race and immigration, the historic and present-day journeys of Indian immigrants have been very much impacted by the long history of racism and anti-racist activism in this country.

Let’s start with some history.  It was only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated race-based national quotas and instead instituted skill and family-based immigration categories for migrant visas, that large numbers of Indian immigrants were able to come to the United States. That act came about because of the civil rights movement for racial equality, whose historic achievements opened the door for overturning the explicitly racialized quotas that were the basis of the prior immigration and naturalization laws. This means that far from falling outside the purview of movements for racial justice, Indian-Americans are in fact the direct beneficiaries of these movements.

Prior to the passage of this law, the racism embedded in American immigration laws placed potential Indian immigrants in an inferior position. For example, in the well-known 1923 Supreme Court case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Court ruled that an Indian immigrant named Bhagat Singh Thind was not eligible for U.S. citizenship, since he was not white as required by the prevailing citizenship laws. Thind had unsuccessfully attempted to argue that as a “high caste Hindu,” he was Caucasian and therefore eligible for citizenship. This recalls current attempts to separate the Indian immigrant experience from the racial discourse in this country. 

Thind’s defense also points to an important, yet often underlooked, facet of Indian immigration—the element of caste. When Thind argued that he should be considered white because he was a “high caste Hindu”, he was referring to the privileges that were accorded to him under the Indian caste system. While its origins are contested, the accumulated class privilege of those belonging to the upper strata of the caste system is not. Vast inequalities in income, wealth, and education continue to track along caste lines in India to this day, even though post-independence India has made some progress towards eliminating the worst forms of de jure caste discrimination.  Data from the Carnegie Endowment shows that 8 out of 10 Indian immigrants in the United States come from dominant-caste communities—despite the fact that just 30 percent of the general population in India can say the same. This demographic inversion stems from the fact that even when immigration quotas for Indians were eased in 1965, the ability to immigrate was still largely restricted to ‘high-skilled’ educated immigrants. Caste oppressed communities who have been systematically denied equal educational opportunities for centuries are less likely to be able to fulfill this criterion. Indian immigrants to the U.S. therefore tend to be a self-selected group with combined caste and class privilege that sets them apart from the majority of Indians in India. This caste dominance has recently become apparent in the contestation over local and state efforts to introduce anti-caste legislation in the U.S. In 2023 Seattle became the first state in the country to ban caste discrimination, whereas a similar California law was thwarted by intense lobbying.

In the Carnegie survey, of those Indian Immigrants who come to the U.S. after completing their education, nearly 42 percent arrived with a bachelor’s degree, and 38 percent held graduate degrees. This is extraordinary when one considers that only about 14 percent of the population in the U.S. have graduate degrees. This enormous entry-level privilege is made invisible when the Indian immigrant experience is used to discredit racial justice movements and policies like affirmative action. In a recently released Asian American voter survey, Indian Americans exhibited the most support for banning the teaching of the history of American racism in schools. It seems some in the community have internalized this divisive ‘model minority’ discourse.

 It is therefore worth reiterating that in coming to the U.S. with impressive levels of education Indian immigrants immediately access relatively higher paid jobs and safe neighborhoods. Unlike other communities of color, they are already better placed to avoid the racially segregated neighborhoods with the long histories of redlining, financial exclusion, failing schools, and neglected infrastructure. To abstract from this reality of class-privilege and claim the false separation between the experiences of Indian Americans and other communities of color is simply ignorance.

Ramya Vijaya is a professor of economics and global studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. She serves on the board of Hindus for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization founded in 2019 to provide a Hindu voice of resistance to caste, Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), and all forms of bigotry and oppression.