Indian Americans Rapidly Climbing Political Ranks

In 2013, the House of Representatives had only one Indian-American member. Fewer than 10 Indian-Americans are serving in state legislatures. No one was elected to the Senate. No one ever ran for president. Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups in the United States, Indian-Americans have virtually no representation in politics.

Ten years later, Congress was sworn in last month that included five Indian-Americans. Nearly 50 people in the state legislature. The Vice president is Indian-American. Nikki Haley’s Campaign Announcement This month makes 2024 the third consecutive cycle in which an Indian-American is running for president and New Candidate Announced by Vivek Ramaswamy make it the first cycle with two.

“We’ve gone from literally having no one to being roughly equal,” said Neil Makhija, chief executive officer of Impact, an Indian-American advocacy group.

Most Indian-American voters are Democrats, and the question is how much support Ms. Haley can garner with their support. In the past, when Indian-Americans ran for office as Republicans, they rarely talked about their family history, but Haley is emphasizing her background.

Activists, analysts, and current and former elected officials, including four out of five Indian-Americans in Congress, describe a range of forces that have underpinned the political influence of Indian Americans.

Indians did not begin moving to the United States in large numbers until after the landmark 1965 immigration law. But several factors, such as the relative wealth of Indian immigrants and high levels of education, have spurred rapid political ascent for the second and third generations.

Advocacy groups — including Impact and the AAPI Victory Fund — mobilized to recruit and support them, and focused politicians’ attention on the voting power of Indian-Americans who have populations in states including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas are large enough to help influence local, state, and federal races.

“It all really works in tandem,” said Raj Goyle, a former Kansas congressman who co-founded Impact. “There’s a natural, socially acceptable tendency, and there’s a deliberate political strategy to make it happen.”

When Mr. Goyle ran for the Kansas House of Representatives in 2006 as a Democrat against a Republican incumbent, he was told that the incumbent’s reaction to learning she had a player is “Who is Rod Doyle?”

“It’s unbelievable that someone named Raj Goyle – let alone Rajeev Goyle – is running for election in Wichita,” he said. Today, “the average voter is much more familiar with the face of an Indian-American on TV, in the exam room, in the classroom, at their college, at the head of their company.”

Looking back, the turning point seems to be in 2016, right after that-Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana becomes the first Indian-American to run for president.

That was also the year Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Ro Khanna of California and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois were elected, bringing the number of Indian Americans in the House from one — Representative Ami Bera of California, elected in 2012. — to four. That was also the year Kamala Harris became the first Indian-American elected to the Senate.

Since then, the number in the state legislature has more than tripled. This January, four House members – who call themselves the Samosa Caucus – joined Representative Shri Thanedar of Michigan.

Political scientists have long discovered that representation begets representation, and that seems to be the case here.

“In the Indian-American community, political participation isn’t really a top priority, because I think people are more focused on economic growth and development,” said Illinois congressman Krishnamoorthi. support their community efforts. “I think once they started seeing people like us get elected and understood why that was important, getting involved in politics became part of their civic hygiene.”

Notably, the increase in Indian-American representation is not concentrated in counties where Indian-Americans are the majority. Ms. Jayapal represents a Seattle-based school district that is predominantly white. Mr. Thanedar represents a county in and around Detroit, a predominantly Black city, and beat eight Black candidates in a Democratic primary election last year.

“This is a completely different kind of phenomenon than what it is,” said Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona University in Southern California and a senior researcher at AAPI Data, an informant group. we often see from representatives of Latinos and blacks. about Asian Americans. “That means they’re pulling a supporting coalition behind them.”

She and Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and founder of AAPI Data, point to characteristics of Indian-American communities that make it easier for them to participate in politics. more valuable.

Professor Ramakrishnan said immigrants from India are often highly educated and because of their British colonial heritage they often speak English, “which reduces barriers to public participation. people”.

India is also a democracy, which Professor Ramakrishnan’s research has shown means that Indian Americans are more likely to participate in the American democratic system than immigrants from other countries peremptory.

Overall, Indian Americans were elected to the Democratic side of the aisle. All five Indian-Americans in Congress, and nearly all state legislators, are Democrats. Haley’s candidacy could be a case study of whether embracing the legacy of Indian immigrants can resonate among Republicans.

Before Haley, the most famous Indian-American to run as a Republican was Jindal, who made the point of discussing his background as little as possible during the presidential campaign. system.

“My parents told my brother and I that we came to America to be Americans, not Indian Americans,” said Mr. Jindal. said in a speech in 2015.

Mr. Ramaswamy, a millionaire businessman, author and “anti-wake” activist has so far taken a similar tactic, but Haley has not. Since she was governor of South Carolina, she has repeatedly cited her life experiences as the daughter of a man in a turban and a woman in a sari. In the first line of her campaign announcement video, through images of her hometown, Bamberg, SC, she told voters: “The train tracks divide the city by race. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not black, not white. I was different.”

Bera, the California congressman, called it “intelligent politics,” saying Haley appeared to be hitting on a desire to move forward in the immigrant community.

It’s an approach that Democrats have taken for a while.

“I am running as a South Asian American immigrant woman,” Jayapal said of her first campaign. “I really run after my story, I run after my experience, and even though I represent an area that is largely white, I think that story is an important part of what makes people elect me.”

But whether Republican voters care is an open question, given the party’s criticism of discussions about race and ethnicity as “identity politics.”

Vikram Mansharamani, a New Hampshire Republican who ran for the Senate last year and recently hosted an event for Haley, says Haley’s life story – the children of people Working-class immigrants whose parents could never have imagined her success – reminded him of his own, and this drew him to her. But he does not consider representation as a goal to strive for.

“As far as identity impacts experience, it is relevant, but I will never lead with identity,” he said.

Harmeet Dhillon, a former co-chair of the group that refused to vote lawyer for Trump and a member of the Republican National Committee who recently lost a bruised battle to lead the committee, stressing that Ms. Haley will run after her track record as a prominent governor of her home state and a member of the Trump administration. “I think most Republican voters are not motivated by race or gender,” she said. Although Ms. Dhillon and her parents immigrated from India, she said she did not identify as Indian-American.

Indian-American voters overwhelmingly follow Democrats: 74% voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 presidential race, more than other Asian voters, according to a survey by AAPI Data, APIAVote and Asian American Advancing Justice. In the primaries, that means fewer Indian-American voters for Republicans to support. In the general elections, the hard-to-reach Republicans are excitedly pushing for their own representation.

IN a 2020 studynearly 60 percent of Indian-Americans say they are willing to vote for an Indian-American candidate “regardless of their party affiliation.”

Professor Sadhwani, one of the authors of the 2020 study, said: “Indian Americans would really like to see more Indian Americans elected to office, and in the survey we did, that’s true even if it means someone from another party.” “I have a feeling that Indian-Americans will be excited to see Nikki Haley take on this role.”

But that willingness is not absolute — especially if, to compete with former President Donald J. Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Haley adopts more of their anti-immigration rhetoric.

Experts and politicians say support for an easier immigration process, while also opposing indigenousism and xenophobia, are key factors in Indian-American political preferences. Mr. Makhija said climate change and other scientific issues also resonate.

Raman Dhillon, executive director of the Punjabi North American Trucking Association, said his interest in Ms Haley was sparked by the fact that her family hails from the same city as him, in Punjab, northern India, where a substantial part of truckers in Canada and the United States tracing their origins.

But he has more important questions for politicians than a question of common legitimacy: Will the government address the lack of parking spaces for large rigs along Highway 99, a major lifeline through the country. through the agricultural heartland of California? What policies will improve driver retention?

Ironically, it is the increase in representation that Ms. Haley participates in that may make her ethnicity less attractive to voters unconvinced by her policies.

“I really think that the more diversity we have, the more practical ideological views will come first,” Ms. Jayapal said. “Once we stop marveling at having an Indian-American woman running for any office, I think we will be able to focus more on practical ideas. And that should be it.”