Today, Explained - Why the right turned on Indians

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

A surge of hate against Indian immigrants and Indian Americans has broken out of the far-right influencer sphere and into mainstream Republican politics. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. Tarrant County, Texas former GOP Chair Bo French speaks during a rally in honor of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 20, 2025, in downtown Fort Worth. Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images. Further reading: Frisco Was a Welcoming Place for Indian Immigrants. Then Came the Influencers. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast⁠.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At a campaign event in Ohio over the weekend, Vivek Ramoswamy, the Republican candidate for governor, tried to pick up a child who was standing next to him on stage, and he fumbled him. He almost dropped the kid. There you go. For me, watching at home, this was hilarious. For a politician, a passing embarrassment, easy enough to explain. I think anyone who's a parent has had that experience. I mean, the kid, not to fat shame the kid, but he was a little chunky.

Afterward, Ramoswami posted a cute picture of himself holding one of his own. of his own kids. And the response online was swift and deranged. Posters questioned Ramoswami's manhood, his Americanness. They said ugly things about his Indian heritage. The people who had negative stereotypes about Indians in their mind said, hey, look, the guy can't even pick up a kid. Look how much of a weakling is. He can't even act like a normal American family man. On Today explained from Vox, there's a growing strain of anti-Indian racism coming from the online right, and now it's moving offline. Sport for Today Explain comes from BetterHelp.

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I'm Zed Jalani, and I'm a freelance journalist based outside Atlanta, Georgia. You have got a piece coming out on Vox.com about increasing racism toward Indian Americans and Indian immigrants in the U.S. The piece starts with Beau French, a gentleman who's running for Texas Railroad Commissioner. I have been the tip of the spear

in fighting woke DEI and the radical communist ideology that has infiltrated our universities. And a tweet that he did a few weeks ago. Why did you start there? Tell me about that. Yeah, look, anyone who follows college football can tell you that that was supposed to be an amazing Saturday

for the Texas Longhorns. We're the team from UT Austin, which is kind of the flagship school in Texas, flagship public university. They had a come from behind victory against Ohio State. In the eye formation. He's got it. Dives.

Touchdown! Their fan base not only in Texas, but around the country was cheering. They were exuberant, right? And so the Longhorn's social media account actually posted a few different reaction images from folks in the stadium. Everyone, of course, was just cheering their team on. They were just so happy to see the Longhorns have that come from behind victory. They posted a video of a section of the crowd that included a lot of Asian Americans, particularly South Asians, right?

people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, right? Now, Bo French, who I think in many ways is a very obscure politician, right? He's running for railroad commissioner in Texas. That's a position that's generally down-ballot, down-ticket, although it's fairly powerful. It regulates the energy sector, oil and gas, in Texas. You know, Bo French posted a response to that video, basically exclaiming that this was a nightmare, you know, a calamity for the University of Texas. That, it has a very much has so many Indian students now, right? I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn't believe it.

The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined. Now, French has been someone who over the years has targeted all kinds of minority groups, right? He's very anti-Muslim, for instance. He's always talking about immigration. In fact, if you go through his social media, he barely talks about the actual position he's running for. But this tweet actually went viral.

and what you found was that it was actually quite polarizing in right-wing social media space, right? He did get some backlash from some Republicans who found inappropriate, but actually a lot of right-wing influencers took his side and started talking about how there's too many Indian Americans at the universities in Texas and just too many Indian Americans in total. I see no problem with this tweet because Indians do not found Texas. Texas culture has a right to exist as well. Why shouldn't he bring up these issues that are affecting Texans? Why shouldn't the people of Texas have the ability to put this on the ballot and have their voices heard over who is coming into their university system? For a lot of people, this was the first time that a lot of this rising prejudice actually came into view.

As you point out, there is a certain type of Republican that was quite upset by what Beau French did. And I'm thinking of Carl Rove, who came out and said after the tweet, I'm going to vote Democrat. My party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. But Carl Rove is not the online. right, right? So who were the bold-faced names in the online right who are sort of spreading this anti-Indian messaging and hatred? Brove was a Bush Republican, right? And under George W. Bush, the right certainly had their animus about illegal immigration on authorized and documented immigration, but they generally speaking believe that if you did things the right way, you should be allowed to

take a shot at the American dream. That's something that Ronald Reagan believed in, it's something that George H.W. Bush believed in. But it's starting to change now, right? And so a lot of what we're seeing is people on sort of the younger online right. I'm talking about Turning Point USA. So this is one of the ways that the culture is changing up here. You have multiple Hindu temples all over the DFW area. The late Charlie Kirk, you know, Blaze TV. If you thought Somalian daycare fraud was a problem, it turns out that's just the tip of the iceberg. The influencers like Jack Posobiac, some of the more extreme influencers like Jake Lang. The Hindus and the Muslims are teaming up to take over Texas. Certainly Nick Fuentes, who is a kind of extreme

who has long given Vice President J.D. Vance grief for marrying the daughter of Indian American immigrants, right? J.D. Vance is fat and ugly and has an Indian wife who is the daughter of immigrants and his kids are all brown. These people have become very influential, highly influential on the right. This younger, more online group of people are generally developing more power in the Republican Party. and I think they're actually causing a little bit of intimidation among the older set of Republicans or the establishment Republicans. I mean, I'll give you an example. Governor Greg Abbott, when he responded to Beau French, he kind of split the difference, right? He said, on the one hand, he argued that, look, everyone who's a Longhorn, who's a student of the university, is part of Texas. They're part of our fabric.

But on the other hand, he did talk about how he was cracking down, for instance, on the H-1B program, which is a visa. program that many Indian immigrants use, right? Almost like he felt like he had to tip his hat somewhat to this group of online folks. He couldn't outright condemn it and he certainly couldn't unendorse or turn against him, which is what figures like Carl Rove or Senator John Cornyn who was defeated in his primary, but who's still Texas Republican Senator for next few months did. Speaking of not outright condemning it, what do you make of J.D. Vance? Look, it's really interesting. If you go back to J.D. Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he actually writes about how when he met his wife, Ushavans, who's Indian American,

and he met her family, it was really the first time in his life he kind of had family who cared for each other, who were very close and tight-knit. He almost favorably compared Indian American culture to the white, you know, lower middle-class culture or middle-class culture that he came from, right? The first time I visited her family for Thanksgiving, I was amazed at the the lack of drama. Ush's mother didn't complain about her father behind his back. There were no suggestions that good family friends were liars or backstabbers. It's fascinating to see an evolution in Vance's thinking because I don't know that Vance would ever do that today, right? Like, I don't know

that Vance courting this sort of MAGA base, this online right base, would ever today argue that there are aspects of Indian American culture that are in some ways preferable to the mainstream cultures in the United States or that are cultures that we can learn from, right? Because that's one of the most, I would say that's the glue that holds the MAGA coalition together, which is skepticism and sometimes even hostility towards foreigners, right? And I think it's very ironic that, you know, President Trump is married to an immigrant, Vice President J.D. Vance is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants. There is a very right-wing, a nativist politician called Brandon Gill, he's a congressman from Texas.

He's actually married to an Indian American woman, right? And yet he is one of the most bituberative and kind of vicious voices, I would say, in terms of talking about the perils of mass immigration, how our culture is being replaced. It's almost like, you know, immigrants have so successfully integrated into the United States, for the most part, that it's almost hard to find someone who's against immigrants who can't totally separate themselves from that, right? In their personal lives, their revealed prefaces come to light. And they learned that, hey, not everyone who immigrants here is all so bad. But politically speaking, I think it's very hard for them to argue that, given what's been created in the Trump era.

That's writer Zed Jalani. When we come back, what set all of this off? Support for today's explain comes from Quo. If you call a business and nobody picks up, what do you do? You probably move on to the next business, who will? Your customers do the exact same thing. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled QUO, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place.

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American racism is very interesting. Always has been. And there is a type that says, this is the sort of Tucker Carlson POV, which is like immigrants are dirty, they come here, they're uneducated, they leach off the government, they're taking our resources. The stereotype of Indian immigrants to America and Indian Americans is people who go to college, people who often have advanced degrees, people who often live in nice neighborhoods, make good money, are sort of family values people.

Why do you think these values that seem as if they sort of mesh with what Republicans want are so triggering to people these days? Is it just, yes, but they're brown? Well, look, I think that is a component of it. You know, I spoke to one Indian American advocate who told me, you know, that Indians and South Asians more broadly are visible minorities, right? If you think about other minorities who are highly successful, that's not always the case. For instance, like, I think that Jewish Americans, right, have been known since the late

20th century as being a successful minority group, but they're not necessarily highly visible, right? Like, you can't always identify someone. If Beau French saw a bunch of white people in the stadium with the long warrants, I'm not sure he would be picking out who's Protestant, who's Catholic, who's Jewish, right? But with Indian Americans, they are highly visible. That being said, I think you have to think about where Indian Americans are in society and the kind of feelings that can create among everyone else, right?

If you look, for instance, at Silicon Valley, the major tech companies, Microsoft Google, the head of the Xbox division, right, is an Indian American woman now. When you have a group of people who I think are in many ways a very micro-minority, We're talking about 1 to 2% of the United States, visibly rising into so many positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks, right? Like, white people generally run the Fortune 500. White folks run the universities. White folks are the most successful doctors and engineers.

And that was true for the 20th century, right? But certainly when you started seeing a much larger influx of Asian immigrants, starting with liberalization of immigration laws in the 60s, but also when there was a rapid growth in the technology sector in the early 2000s, I think when you start to see that, you may understand a little bit more where the resentment comes from because it's more, I would say, analogically similar to anti-Semitism than it is to maybe the racism that Mexican Americans face

or the racism that black Americans face, right? It's not that Indian Americans are necessarily being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally, so on and so forth, it's more that they're being seen as a status threat to a lot of particularly middle class Americans, right? People who want their kids to rise to the top of their school, who want their kids to have the corner office, right? They want their kids to be able to get the most prestigious positions.

I think in the minds of a lot of these people, not only now does their kid have to compete with all the other normal white kids in their community, they have to compete against the entire world, right? And I think that's part of what's driving the, it's just a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.

When you talk to Indian Americans for this piece, what did you hear from them that surprised you? Probably the most surprising thing was how much pragmatism they responded to all this with, right? I don't imagine nine times out of ten when you have stories about racism, the victims of racism are outraged and understandably and justifiably outrage, right? They don't want, nobody wants to be mistreated, nobody wants to be denigrated. They certainly don't want to see restrictions on, you know, right to immigration, on other things to limit their numbers, which is the end point of a lot of this. But at the same time, I think a lot of the people I spoke to, they were very up front of that.

like, hey, look, we have found a lot of success in America. We got the golden ticket, right, to be able to come here for our kids to study here, to be able to really seek these opportunities. But we understand what's happening in the economy. We understand there's a lot of people who are struggling, and then they see us rising to the top of all these organizations. They see us with our kind of well-inskorn place in the economy. And, you know, I think it's important for us not to flaunt our success that much.

I, you know, at least a couple people said something to that respect. We have achieved, but don't flaunt. That flaunting, that putting out. That's where it creates envy. And that's created hatred. They almost kind of empathize with the people who were hating on them, right? And it just struck me as such a classic immigrant pragmatism that you see from the first or second wave of immigrants, right?

People who realize that they are newcomers to a society or maybe their parents were newcomers to a society, right? And that there is a certain level of grappling. they have to do with like, hey, how can we continue to have success? How can we continue to grind and, you know, resist this racism, but also like nut rub it in people's faces that we're doing well, because the more they do that, you know, the tougher can be in it. And actually a number brought up Vivek Ramoswami in the sense that, you know, Vivek happened to go on social media and just talk about and describe what he felt like were deficiencies in American culture when it

comes to studying, when it comes to working hard. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. And this caused a massive outrage on the right. And he was out of the administration very, very quickly. This may have been related. It's not 100% clear. But I think that, you know, in bringing that up, they were saying that that wasn't

particularly helpful because, like, whatever positive aspects there may be to Indian immigrant culture, we should know. talk about them in ways that denigrate other people, right? Because that's obviously going to wrote people the wrong way. One of the things that we have covered on the show before, a dynamic that we've seen, is something that starts online, moves offline, and ends up influencing policy, influencing the way people in the real world think. Do you think or worry that we might see that in this case, that Beau French's random, weird, racist tweet, six months or a year or 18 months from now become something that we're seeing in immigration policy or elsewhere.

Look, I think to some extent we're already starting to see it. Hundreds of Texas educators could be forced out of public school classrooms under a new proposal from Governor Greg Abbott. Exactly zero Texas public school employees should be here on H-1B visas. H-1B visa is a visa that people from all over the world use it, but a majority of people who apply and go through it are Indian immigrants. some of them become Indian Americans. And I think it's kind of hard for me to see a world where that would have happened

without this rising antagonism towards Indians, right? Because, yes, there are economic arguments to be made about H-1B visas. There are, you know, some people in labor, I think, have concerns about H-1B visas, making sure they're not being used to undercut wages, so on and so forth. But it's very hard for me to see that actually being a major concern for the Republicans without the racial cultural angle, right? And I think that the administration has not been particularly friendly to labor overall,

but I think once you combine those labor concerns with this fear of replacement, this fear of ethnic competition, you do start seeing more, I think, policies that actually come forth to restrict those visas, which is a de facto way of restricting Indian economic competition and Indian immigration.

The president's signing a proclamation that now requires this $100,000 annual fee for this H-1B visa for highly skilled foreign workers. Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on these visas that were given away for free. And the more of this goes on, I think the H-1B visa will become a very, very, very popular proxy. You'll see more and more people campaigning against it saying, hey, this is a way for Americans to be replaced by Indians. Is the intense of these work visas bringing Indians to America to support. our labor force or to replace it altogether. The ongoing issues with the H-1B visas and the Indians in North Texas has not gone away.

How come Indian Americans can move into my home in Texas and completely take it over and be proud that they're Indian? You're making the point that some of the surge in anti-Indian racism on the right is about status anxiety. I was listening to this podcast that Chris Rufo and Jonathan Kieperman did. These are two influential right-wing activists. We've had Chris Rufo on the show. They called it the Indian question. A lot of people's eyebrows shot up. And they seem to be making the argument that it is about status anxiety.

They also were making less coherent arguments. Successful assimilation is precisely, Chris, that you wouldn't notice it. We wouldn't have anything to talk about. The mere fact of us being able to notice that, no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game, is itself sort of definitionally the case that they're not yet assimilated. There was another argument about it's un-American to study for the spelling bee, which is what South Asian kids do. Did you ever study for the spelling bee? Never. Of course not. That's actually the unspoken rule.

But white kids are more American because they play football, then they go to a party and get drunk, and then they get 1,500 on the SAT. That's the American here. Okay, that's like the American superstar. So I'm not saying any of this makes sense. I'm saying it was fascinating. I'm assuming you watch that exchange. What did you make of that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a certain level of coping mechanism being deployed there, right?

In the sense that they are trying to explain the success of Indian Americans as a deficiency, right? Like, okay, maybe they're getting to the top schools, but that's because they're shut in. day studying. But actually, like, it's not really true that Indian Americans are necessarily cloistered into unhealthy habits. I mean, they're actually finding success across society. So, for instance, like, I've tutored kids for five, six years. Like, I just really enjoy it. Like, working with kids. And something you'll find with a lot of the Indian American kids, they are actually getting increasingly well-rounded, right? And, like, part of that is because you have to, to have success to get college admissions and so on and so forth. You know, they almost always play

sports, they're involved in extracurriculars. You're seeing a lot more Indian Americans go into the arts, into cultural fields, into Hollywood. And I think that's actually a very normal, like, path for immigrants. I think the first or second wave of immigrants has to be very pragmatic. They have to keep their heads down. They have to, you know, grind, study. And their parents encourage them to do the same thing, right? Like Indian American parents are always like, you got to be a doctor. You got to be engineer. Like, don't, don't be foolish and try to be a journalist or go to Hollywood. But as they establish themselves, as they build nest eggs, they have a little more breathing room, right? And so they can do different things. I mean, I know that Christopher Rufo, for instance, is an Italian American.

And I believe I read one time that he even speaks Italian at home because he really values that culture so much. And when he wants to raise his kids in that, the first wave of Italian immigrants were no different in that. You know, they cloister into a few sectors where they felt they could they could find success that was necessary for their integration to the economy and to get their footing. But now, you know, we don't think of Italian Americans as stereotyped into just a few parts of the country or a few parts of society. We barely notice unless maybe notice from someone's name that there even are Italian Americans. So actually what they're describing about Indian Americans is very normal. It's actually very normal for first waves of immigrants

to cluster in a few areas. And then they spread themselves out as they're able to get a little bit of breathing room and round a stand on. That is writer Zed Jelani. You can find him on Vox.com. Thanks today also to writer Mark Dent. He wrote a great piece for Texas Monthly about anti-Indian sentiment in the city of Frisco, Texas.

Miles Bryan produced today's show, and Jolie Myers edited. Gabriel Duneduff is our fact checker, David Tadishore and Bridger Dunnigan engineered. And I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.