It is that time in the history of this nation that we will all (or most of us anyway) be waving the “red, white, and blue” along with our fellow citizens, at venues as different in size, color, and shape as the shoppers at any local Walmart. Some of us will be flying the Indian tricolor along with the Stars and Stripes. But wait! Why are we here in the first place? We did not come here to escape tyranny and oppression. We did not come here because of war or want. So, when did we come here, for what reasons, and what do we consider this land that we now call home? For if we are not sure about the answers to these questions, the stories we can share with our “American” neighbors and friends will be incomplete, confusing, and pointless.
“America is the land of immigrants,” we are all told, but how does “our” migration story fit into the grand American narratives of the Colonial Era (1600s-1700s), the First Wave (1820-1880), the Second Wave (1880-1920), the Restriction Era (1920-1965), and the Global Era (1965-present)? The first Indians who landed on the shores of the United States might have been brought here as slaves, historians tell us, as they trace them back to within a generation of the English setting up camp in Jamestown, and note that there were English- and French-speaking Indian slaves, who had been “Christianized,” and who considered themselves a different class of slaves.
But why did they do so? Simply because this red, white, and blue land is on a “black” background, so to speak, and color has cast its shadow over much of this land for much of its two hundred and fifty years of independence. We are neither black nor white, we believe, but are we any different shade of brown than our Mexican, Arab, Thai, or Filipino fellow Americans? We stand out for different reasons, but we come in different colors and speak different languages, and eat different foods, cooked differently. We are “diversely Indian”!
The Chinese comedian Joe Wong makes fun of the slapdash way in which we identify skin colors, but be that as it may, it is on colored wings that the American eagle flies, and it may be brought low because of “color wars” that many of the “left” Indian Americans are leading.
By the way, how many of those original Indian slaves survive? Did they marry, have children, and did their children make a life for themselves? We don’t know, and Ancestry.com might not be able to track them down for the curious historian. Only a very few of the Indian American historians, sociologists, or ethnographers now doing research seem to care about those stories. It is that same set of blinkers that we now wear while a flood of Indians have made their way here, legally or illegally, over the past two decades, especially after Y2K.
The “Second Wave” brought about 6,000 Sikhs, landing on the West Coast, who were mostly male, illiterate, and unskilled laborers and agricultural workers, arriving between 1907 and 1909, before the authorities called a halt, and local “crackers” harassed and tried to run them off. Many of the Punjabis were persistent, however, and their descendants are now some of the biggest landowners in California.
We began to arrive here in larger numbers after 1965, and we are now considered some of the newest of immigrants, with the vast majority of us having been born outside of the United States, mostly in India but also having arrived from England, Africa, and the Caribbean. According to a Pew report, in 2022, there were about 4.8 million Indian Americans. Wikipedia claims that we are now some 5.4 million. When this writer arrived in 1985, there were only about 526,000 of us. Within twenty years, we have added five more million. How come the surge? We now comprise over 80 percent of all H-1B visa holders. Our household income is the highest among all other households – almost twice the American average of $65,000. There are some 80,000 doctors of Indian origin, and while we make up only 1.5 percent of the total population, we account for roughly 5 to 8.5 percent of all doctors practicing in the country.
As per the Pew report, two-thirds of Indian Americans (66%) are immigrants, while 34% are US-born. Half of us live in just four states: California (20%), Texas (12%), New Jersey (9%), and New York (7%), but if one were to visit Frisco, TX, or Alpharetta, GA, one might think that only Telugus live in the two areas. Of the 180 students admitted to a local medical university that this writer’s son attends, 15 percent had the last name “Patel”. How come the Patels who own motels, are making their children pursue medicine? How come the surge of Telugus in Frisco, TX, and why, for the sake of Sri Rama, the 90-foot statue of Sri Hanuman in Houston, and that “Visa Venkateshwara” temple in Hyderabad?
In a recent (2025) study about the number of illegal Indian immigrants, Budiman and Kapur say that the number ranges from 220,000 to 720,000 depending on who is doing the counting – the Department of Homeland Security, the Pew Research Center, the Center for Migration Studies, or the Migration Policy Institute. These Indians made up anywhere from 2.0 to 3.9 percent of all unauthorized/illegal immigrants in the country.
These many Indians have those many stories to tell, but as it has happened in history all along, only a few stories get told. We can offer some numbers to offer some context on who we are and why we came here. Gujaratis make up about 14 percent of us, Maharashtrians about 12 percent, Telugus about 10 percent, Tamilians about 9 percent, Punjabis about 8 percent, and Malayalis about 7 percent. There are 21 Indian-origin CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and they now make up over ten percent of Fortune 500 companies. But we are also gas station owners, run restaurants, drive Uber taxis, and teach across this vast country in top-ranked universities as well as in far-flung, rarely known small and regional colleges.
However, the question remains: why are we here? What is the American dream to us? In the land of the free and the brave, did we arrive to seek freedom, or to merely make some money, boast about it back home, where we then buy apartments and gold? We are from the largest democracy in the world and from the only surviving great civilization, but our ability to shape the American dream has been rather puny and half-hearted. Our great books and philosophies, our practices and beliefs, have mesmerized some of the greatest of American poets and philosophers, scientists and doctors, but our imprint on the public and cultural life of America has been small, despite all of the Lululemon-wearing women in yoga studios.
Finally, what kind of relationship does our new home have with our old home? We can characterize the Indo-US relationship as troubled and as a relationship that has belied its potential. Whatever might be the reasons — Cold War era estrangement, the American penchant to equate India with the terrorist-state Pakistan, the blowing hot-blowing cold personal relationships between India’s prime ministers and American presidents, and the many jaundiced commentaries by India-baiting academics and journalists, and ideologically slanted bodies like the USCIRF — the two largest democracies in the world have not yet firmly tied the diplomatic and trade knots over the past eight decades that might have reshaped the world for better. It is doubtful that it will happen during the mercurial and unpredictable present tenure of President Trump, as Indian leaders and citizens fret about the unnecessary needling and provocations by the administration. Given the deep divisions in present-day American politics and the gamesmanship of many establishment power-wielders, Indian contributions to the “idea of America” might not even get a footnote in the celebrations planned for July 4th.
Americans are pragmatic, and we Indian Americans are accommodating, willing to bide our time and consult our many fortune tellers, locally and back home, for when the time is ripe for building a trusting and long-lasting relationship. However, we can hope that starting this July 4th, we can usher in a new era that will be inspired and led by the two largest and greatest democracies in the world, and that soon we will begin to tell our stories of want, desire, and travel more carefully and more colorfully.
Ramesh Rao retired recently from Columbus State University in Columbus, GA, where he was a professor of communication studies.
Parikh Worldwide Media is the largest Indian-American publishing group in the United States. The group publishes five periodicals – “News India Times,” a national weekly newspaper; “Desi Talk in New York,” a weekly newspaper serving the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region; and “Desi Talk in Chicago,” a weekly newspaper serving the Greater Chicago area and the Midwestern states; and “The Indian American,” a national online quarterly feature magazine, and the Gujarat Times, a Gujarati language weekly. The combined circulation and readership of these publications make the media group the most influential in the ethnic Indian market.
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