Sushil Aaron 
No one expected Indians and Indian Americans to find themselves in the middle of a culture war that has broken out within Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
But that’s where the 5.2 million people of Indian origin in the US are – caught between tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who back H-1B visas and want more highly skilled immigrants in the US, and activists like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, who represent the anti-immigrant, non-college educated white voters who are solidly behind Trump.
Recent weeks have seen nasty exchanges online over this debate. Musk maintains that there is a shortage of engineers and agreed with a post that called Americans “retarded”, while Loomer made it clear in tweets that the US did not need to import more Indians.
Ramaswamy made things worse with a tweet which called American culture mediocre and criticised the way Americans bring up their children, which he reckons primes US kids for mediocrity in contrast to the productive ways of immigrant life.
Ramaswamy’s tweet fuelled a lot of distasteful anti-Indian commentary online, even as conservative figures hardened their stand on restricting legal migrants. Bannon now regularly targets H-1B visas in his popular podcast, calling the visas “a scam” which companies use to deprive Americans of jobs.
He wants: a “100% moratorium on all immigration”, to deport workers on H-1B visas and is demanding that US companies pay reparations to American workers who lost their jobs to immigrants.
This will have taken many in the Indian middle class, with interests in the West, by surprise – particularly Hindu nationalist supporters of the ruling BJP. The latter may have thought that they had worked out how to deal with the Trump administration. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, after all, established a good equation with Trump, appeared to back him for a second term with a joint rally in Houston which featured chants of ‘ab ki baar, Trump sarkar’.
Besides, India remains a big market for US weapons and consumer goods and a power that other countries want to cultivate. They may have also reckoned that a shared dislike of Muslims would tie Hindu nationalists in the diaspora to the Trump base.
Immigration fatigue
That calculus no longer works since populations in the US and other countries in the West have visibly tired of all immigration; conservatives continuously rail against the ‘woke agenda’ which they feel is at war with their Christian heritage and way of life.
Trump’s MAGA world and the Right in Europe see multiculturalism as a vehicle used by the Left to assert minority identities in public spaces while it simultaneously trashes Western culture.
Trump’s victories, Brexit, and the rise of the far-right in Germany, France and Italy all indicate a greater aversion to foreign cultures, immigrants and a gradual acceptance of more radicalised speech directed towards them. The gates are gradually shutting in the Western world: Canada, Australia and New Zealand tightened immigration rules in 2024 and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is now the second-most popular party in Britain, according to polls.
This churn in the West’s outlook towards foreigners is a problem for India because emigration has become an important escape option for the middle class to compensate for its declining prospects at home.
More and more affluent and aspiring Indians see their future as lying in the West. Around 1.6 million Indians have surrendered their citizenship since 2011, some 225,620 in 2023 alone. Two million Indian students are expected to be enrolled abroad this year, and “more than a million Indians, including dependents, are currently waiting in employment-based [US] green card categories.”
These figures may not sound like much in a nation of 1.4 billion people, but they speak to the nature of the brain drain and the eagerness of many Indians to leave.
Indians will need to respond on two levels to cultural upheavals in the West. One is to formulate a set of strategies at home for education and employment as opportunities abroad thin out.
Second, and more immediately, is to react to the culture wars in the West as they are going on. Indian immigrants and Indian Americans will no longer have the luxury of being on the sidelines as anti-immigration sentiment swirls around them. They will need to pick a side while MAGA adopts a take-no-prisoner approach and as left-liberals push back against Trump’s agenda in courts, universities and on the streets.
Also read | How India’s Assembly Line Education System Shapes the Perfect H1B Candidate
What liberals offer
Indians may have no choice but to draw closer to Western progressives as the latter are likely to sustain the conditions that enable immigrants to economically prosper. Immigrants get to thrive in foreign countries only when the rule of law works on impersonal lines, and not when native majorities get to tip the scale.
Culturally too there is an advantage in aligning with progressives. White conservatives are getting very worked up that foreigners build temples and mosques on their lands while their own levels of religious observance and population are declining. Left-liberals, on the contrary, do not care much about faith matters nor are they too bothered about where population growth in their countries comes from.
Democrats like Bernie Sanders may be against H-1B visas as well, but they do not target Indians on cultural grounds.
All told, liberals are the best bet to facilitate immigrant choices, whether they choose to live in ethnic enclaves or assimilate into the broader culture.
The majority of Indians support Democrats, but the BJP has, contrary to the interests of Indians abroad, been steering the politics of the diaspora towards conservatives in other countries. This was done to reinforce its illiberal, anti-Left politics at home and worked fine so long as Reaganite economic liberals, who back globalisation and immigrants, were in charge; but now social conservatives and isolationists are ascendant in the US.
The BJP doesn’t seem to have anticipated this turn of events and needs a change in strategy for its supporters’ sake. But recalibrating towards Western progressives is not a straightforward matter for Hindu nationalists who have been vilifying Muslims, Christians and the Left in India in recent years – a fact that is well-known to progressives abroad. They cannot make common cause with other minorities in the West while attacking minorities at home.
There is no indication that the BJP, as a party and government, has answers to questions posed by the age of Trump. It is neither able to limit the effects of MAGA on Indians nor can it switch sides towards progressives. It will therefore live with the duality of pursuing polarising politics at home to win elections while a section of its base gestures towards liberal politics abroad.
It is a posture that can unsettle Hindu nationalism in unforeseen ways, by pitting pro and anti-West factions against each other. It will also not help Indians gain friends and allies in other countries when they are likely to need them the most.
Sushil Aaron writes on politics and foreign affairs. He posts on Bluesky and X: @SushilAaron.