TOI correspondent from Washington: An Indian-American Congressman who expressed support for the H-1B visa program and greater legal immigration to the US was trolled viciously over the weekend and asked to “go back to India” by MAGA malcontents as arguments on the issue turned toxic with even US-born Americans of Indian origin and legal immigrants facing the brunt of extreme nativist fury.
“Can I buy you a ticket to Mumbai? One way, of course,” “Wow, you are a foreigner shilling for more of your compatriots to flood into my country and compete against my people? Fuck you. You need to be denaturalized and deported,” and “Go back to your own country and be innovative there,” were some of the comments directed against Michigan Democrat Shri Thanedar, after he called for “increasing H-1B visas and streamlining the H-1B and greencard process” so that “America maintains our edge on innovation & discovery.”
“As an immigrant myself, the H-1B issue is close to my heart,” the Karnataka-born US lawmaker said in a series of posts on the issue, arguing “attracting legal, talented immigrants to the United States benefits everyone, and the system must be streamlined and reformed.”
“Unfortunately, the H-1B visa discourse has been hijacked by MAGA racism and xenophobia. It’s wrong and must be called out. We should be attracting legal, talented immigrants to support American businesses,” Thanedar wrote.
The xenophobia, directed mainly at Indians, who receive a majority of H-1B visas, has burst out in the open in more extreme MAGA circles that refuse to accept the argument that the US has shortage of talent, skills, and academic chops to ensure American primacy in the 21st century. They accuse US corporations, including Elon Musk and his companies, of colluding with “bodyshopping” firm to “import” low wage foreign workers, mainly from India, to undercut wages of American workers and eventually replace them.
“Will you adjust how 73% of H-1Bs have historically gone to Indians and 13% to Chinese, while 0.3% have gone to European groups like Germans?” one critic asked Thanedar without accounting for India’s population, proficiency in English, and a well-established path of immigration via US college degrees among other factors.
Fueling nativist fury were also remarks by Trump acolyte and Musk associate Vivek Ramaswamy, who opened a whole new can of worms by asserting that lack of emphasis on education and academic rigor among other cultural factors could result having “our asses handed to us by China” in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long … A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote.
The posts unleashed white hot fury from MAGA hardliners who saw them as a “put down” of white nativists.
“The Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B’s. Then why did everyone want to come here?” one critic responded, while another descended into, “What percentage of Indian households have flushable toilets? I find it absolutely hilarious that anyone from a caste system would denigrate American culture.”
Some Indian-American Republicans are discovering that their support for MAGA is misplaced and they are viewed with disdain by the hard right, a rejection publicly expressed by conservative white commentator Ann Coulter, who once told Vivek Ramaswamy on TV, “I agreed with many things you said…but I would not have voted for you because you’re an Indian.”
MAGA nativists insisted that the H-1B visa program was being exploited and abused by US and Indian tech companies and Indians to undercut wages of American workers and displace them, despite increasing safeguards that prevent companies from hiring foreign guest workers unless there are no qualified American personnel for the job, and other labor department compliance requirements.
