The Growing Hatred for Indian Americans: A Reflection on History and Patterns of Scapegoating

I have never been comfortable with the posture of victimhood. Not for the sake of drawing sympathy. To live always in the shadow of grievance is to allow resentment to shape one’s identity. Yet there are moments when refusing to speak honestly about patterns of hostility is not strength, but denial. As an Indian American, I cannot ignore what we are witnessing — a rising hostility in right-wing spaces, casual cruelty wrapped in memes, resentment disguised as “economic anxiety.” It deserves to be named and called out.

This is not about playing the victim. It is about identifying a recurring pathology of history. At different moments in time, different groups have been scapegoated in America: Irish immigrants in the 19th century, Chinese laborers in the late 1800s, Japanese Americans during World War II, Jewish Americans during periods of populist backlash, African Americans across centuries. Today, Indian Americans increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs.

When Aaron Ely, a former MMA fighter turned IT worker (he was interviewed at an ICE Job Fair), told The Washington Post reporter that he wanted to join ICE so he could “slam your face on the pavement and send you home” after seeing memes about Indians “taking tech jobs,” he was not speaking in isolation but voicing a worldview incubated in certain corners of American political life. It is a worldview in which the economic anxieties of one group become a license to dehumanize another. And when that worldview gains legitimacy through right-wing media and MAGA rhetoric, history tells us it is time to pay attention.

The “New Jews” of the 21st Century?

To say Indian Americans are the “new Jews” of the 21st century is not to equate their experience with the horrors of the Holocaust. Nothing in America today resembles the organized, industrial destruction that Nazi Germany carried out. But the early dynamics — resentment of professional success, suspicion of cultural difference, whispers of disloyalty — are similar enough to warrant reflection.

And the numbers fuel the perception. Indian Americans top the U.S. income ladder, with a median household income of over $100,000, far higher than the national average of $56,000. They also lead in education, with 70% holding at least a bachelor’s degree compared to a national average of 28%. On paper, these are markers of achievement. In the politics of resentment, however, they become evidence of arrogance.

When placed against the history of Jewish Americans, the parallels deepen. A new study on elite positions across sectors shows that Jews (just 2.2% of the U.S. population) hold outsized representation in academia, law, medicine, and media. Indian Americans — just 1.6% of the population — are beginning to follow a similar trajectory.

Consider the numbers: Indian Americans make up roughly 25% of tech university C-suite roles, 12% of top physicians, 15% of high finance leadership, and even 7% of American billionaires. This level of visibility is not a function of sheer numbers — it is the result of concentrated achievement within particular fields. Yet to those outside looking in, such statistics do not inspire admiration; they provoke envy.

History shows that whenever a minority group’s presence in elite sectors exceeds its share of the population, suspicion follows. Jews in early 20th-century America and Europe were caricatured as “controlling” finance or academia. Today, Indian Americans are accused of “colonizing” Silicon Valley or dominating medicine. The pattern is not about truth but about perception: success without whiteness has always been read as a threat in America.

The MAGA Ecosystem: From Memes to Violence

If resentment is the spark, the MAGA ecosystem is the accelerant.

Right-wing spaces thrive on scapegoating because it offers a simple narrative: if you are struggling, it is not because corporations automated your job, or because politicians gutted pensions, or because healthcare costs have ballooned. It is because some “outsider” has taken what was rightfully yours. The MAGA ecosystem feeds on othering. There’s always a new “Them” in the Us vs Them battle they keep fighting.

Figures like Charlie Kirk repeat this message endlessly. His recent claim that America must “stop importing cheap foreign tech workers who undermine American graduates” is not new. It is a repackaging of old populist resentment, with Indians as the new convenient target. Tucker Carlson has made similar insinuations, blending anti-immigrant rhetoric with envy of tech success.

What begins in memes on 4chan and Telegram channels — Indians mocked for accents, curry jokes, caricatures about arranged marriages — bleeds into the language of political influencers. As Richard Hanania has observed in his essay “Why Republican Normies Will Bend,” the so-called mainstream right rarely resists its fringes. It absorbs them. 

The question is whether America will choose to see Indian American contributions as enrichment or as threat. History warns us of the cost of envy, but it also offers another lesson: when societies embrace diversity as strength, they flourish.

Today’s joke in a Facebook group becomes tomorrow’s congressional talking point.

We have seen this before. Anti-Chinese cartoons in 19th-century newspapers helped create the cultural climate that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In fact, during the debates in Congress, Senator John F. Miller of California declared that Chinese immigrants were “machine-like… of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron, living on rice and rat meat.” Such rhetoric dehumanized immigrants into a caricature of inhuman laborers, paving the way for a law that would be the first in U.S. history to explicitly bar a group by race.

Fast forward to 1942: Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, were rounded up and forced into internment camps after Pearl Harbor. Military leaders like General John DeWitt testified, “A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.” This blanket suspicion, couched as “national security,” was in reality the same old logic: fear plus resentment equals exclusion.

The progression is always the same:

ridicule → resentment → rhetoric → policy → violence.

History’s playbook rarely changes — only the actors do.

And MAGA memes and tweets about Indian Americans are not just “jokes.” They are the first stage of this process.

Economic Anxiety as Cover for Racism

Defenders of anti-immigrant rhetoric often insist this is not about race but it is about jobs. They claim that Americans who feel displaced are simply responding rationally to unfair competition. But history reveals how hollow this excuse is.

Irish immigrants in the 19th century were accused of undercutting wages. Yet what truly hurt American labor was the absence of worker protections and the dominance of exploitative employers. Chinese immigrants were scapegoated for economic downturns, but the real culprit was industrial capitalism, which pitted workers against each other while funneling profits upward.

Today, the U.S. tech market has shed jobs. The Washington Post noted that nearly 27% of programmer positions disappeared in just two years. But those jobs were not “stolen” by Indian workers. They were replaced by automation, outsourced by corporations seeking cheaper labor abroad, or eliminated altogether. The companies making those choices are rarely blamed. Instead, resentment is redirected downward, onto visible immigrant workers.

As a Michigander, I can’t help but recall Detroit in 1982 — a tragic reminder of how quickly economic jealousy can curdle into racial violence. Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death by two white autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese. Japan’s auto industry was then surging, and many Detroit workers felt economically threatened. Instead of blaming corporations or policymakers for failing to protect their livelihoods, they projected their rage onto an innocent man who happened to look like their imagined enemy. The killers received probation and a small fine. But no jail time.

Vincent Chin’s death was not an accident. It was the product of a culture where economic grievance had been racialized, where resentment against global capitalism was redirected toward visible minorities. That same logic now animates resentment toward Indian Americans in tech.

This is why the rhetoric of “economic anxiety” is so dangerous. It allows racism to disguise itself as pragmatism. It provides a socially acceptable cover for bigotry. And it turns structural failures into interpersonal resentments. “White worker vs. Indian engineer”, rather than worker vs. corporation.

As with Jewish scapegoating in early 20th-century Europe, the hostility is less about reality and more about projection. Immigrants become symbols onto which a society projects its own insecurities.

The new resentment toward Indian Americans follows this exact arc. Yes, Indian Americans are overrepresented in elite sectors. But that reality is twisted into a narrative that they are “stealing” opportunities, when the real culprits are structural: automation, outsourcing, and profit-driven corporations. It is easier for demagogues to point to an Indian software engineer than to confront the systemic failures of American capitalism.

We may yet see calls for Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella to be forced out — not because of their performance, but for what they symbolize: immigrant achievement at the highest levels.

A Call to Resist

The lesson of history is not that Indian Americans are destined for persecution. It is that scapegoating, once unleashed, rarely confines itself to a single target. Today it is memes about Indians “stealing tech jobs.” Tomorrow it could be another immigrant group accused of corrupting culture or taking resources.

That is why resistance must come early and come broadly. Calling out the falsehoods of people like Charlie Kirk, challenging meme culture that dehumanizes, and insisting that economic grievances be directed at the true culprits — corporations and policymakers — are essential steps. I am glad that there are many non-Indian Americans doing that already. But Indian Americans with influence — even figures embraced by the MAGA ecosystem — like Vivek Ramaswamy or Usha Vance — should recognize that silence here is complicity. They, too, should speak out.

What is also important is building solidarity: Indian Americans must link arms with other communities that have faced scapegoating, from Jewish and Asian groups to African Americans and Latinos.

History also warns us not to grow complacent. Japanese Americans who proudly declared loyalty to the U.S. in the 1930s still found themselves in internment camps in the 1940s. Jewish Germans who fought valiantly in World War I still found themselves cast as enemies in the 1930s. Economic resentment does not pause to ask whether its targets are “model citizens.”

To resist, then, is not only to defend Indian Americans. It is to defend the integrity of the American project itself. For if America is to mean anything, it must mean that belonging cannot be so easily revoked by jealousy, fear, or resentment.

The call is simple: recognize the pattern, resist the dehumanization, and insist on solidarity over scapegoating. Anything less is to leave the field open to those who would turn memes into policy and resentment into violence.

Contributions Worth Celebrating

And yet, the story of Indian Americans in the United States is not only one of resilience in the face of prejudice. It is also a story of extraordinary contributions. The same data that feeds resentment also testifies to how immigrant communities have enriched America. Indian Americans are not merely “overrepresented” in tech or medicine — they are curing diseases, founding companies, leading universities, and serving in government. They are expanding the boundaries of American literature, music, and film. They are raising their voices in politics, not as outsiders, but as citizens who believe in the unfinished promise of this country.

This, too, has a historical precedent. Jewish Americans, despite enduring decades of suspicion, reshaped American arts, sciences, and politics. From Jonas Salk developing the polio vaccine to writers like Saul Bellow redefining the American novel, their contributions became inseparable from the American story. Indian Americans are walking a similar path today, from Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai in technology to Kamala Harris and Pramila Jayapal in politics, to Jhumpa Lahiri, Hasan Minhaj, and Vijay Iyer in culture.

The question is whether America will choose to see these contributions as enrichment or as threat. History warns us of the cost of envy, but it also offers another lesson: when societies embrace diversity as strength, they flourish.

The data tables and charts — incomes, degrees, elite positions — can be read as cause for resentment or cause for celebration. Resentment narrows the American story into a zero-sum game. Celebration expands it, reminding us that the U.S. has always been renewed by the energy of newcomers.

If scapegoating is the oldest American reflex, contribution is the truest American legacy. History has shown, again and again, what happens when resentment drowns out recognition. To remember this lesson is to give America a chance to become what it claims to be.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” — Politics, Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.