The Case Against Indian Immigration
A Misaligned Elite in the Making
A Model Minority?
Most American immigration discourse focuses on basically apolitical1 things, such as first-order economic effects and crime. On average, immigrants to the United States lower wages, increase housing prices, drive Americans away from centers of productivity, are net recipients of public money, and (at least in the second generation and beyond) are more criminal than American whites. These facts drive popular opposition to immigration. While rarely discussed in these terms, they are all closely connected to the question of national IQ, which is by far the best predictor of economic growth, and which is lowered by immigration in every Western country except for Australia.
However, these issues don’t apply to Indian immigration to the United States. For starters, Indian-Americans have the highest household income of any group in the country, and given America’s steeply progressive tax and transfer system, are therefore a huge fiscal positive.
And Indians aren’t just replacement-level white collar workers. They’re significantly overrepresented among both STEM company founders and innovators generally. Indians make up approximately 5% of the immigrant population of California, but found 20% of the immigrant-founded companies, and at less than 1% of the American population, foreign-born Indians also make up around 7.5% of innovators in the United States.
While there isn’t great data for criminal offending by national origin, Asian-Americans have the lowest crime rates of any racial census category in the United States and Indians are exceptionally high-SES even among Asians, so it’s almost certain that Indian-American crime rates are well below the national or white average.
Indian-Americans earn lots of money, pay taxes, build STEM companies, innovate, and don’t commit much crime. Great! So why not bring them all in?
Indian Immigration is Very Selective
The current Indian-American population is extraordinarily selected for two reasons. First, a majority of Indian-Americans are legal first-generation immigrants admitted to the United States on skilled-labor visas. As the Indian diaspora is very new, there hasn’t been much time for the family-reunification-based chain migration that most US immigrants use.
Second, US immigration policy has fixed2 annual caps per country. This means that immigration from larger countries is more selective by default, and India is the largest country in the world.
The result is that Indian-Americans are selected to an almost absurd degree. A few ways of looking at this:
43% of first-generation Indians have a postgraduate degree of some sort, and another 34% have a bachelor’s. Less than 1% have not graduated high school. This is coming from a country in which only 11% have any sort of higher education and only 29% graduate high school.
Among the top 1000 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduates, 36% emigrate (rising to 62% among the top 100), with 65% of these emigrants moving to the United States.
While testing data from India isn’t of great quality, the best evidence suggests a national IQ of around 763. After regression to the mean, the average second-generation Indian immigrant in the United States has an IQ of 102.
A reasonable estimate is that the median Indian immigrant to the United States is 2 standard deviations above the Indian norm – the Indian equivalent of Harvard grads.
This incredible level of selection means that Indian overperformance is not here to stay. In the absence of deliberate policies to prevent it, the following three changes to Indian immigration are almost certain:
A shift from skilled worker visas to family reunification as the main driver of immigration, as is already the case for most groups. This will quickly take Indian-Americans from far above the Indian average to marginally so at best.
An increase in the overall number of Indian immigrants, reducing selectivity. As discussed later, the pro-Indian immigration lobby is strong, and Indian immigration is increasing rapidly year on year. Immigration typically begets more immigration, and the pool of potential migrants is practically infinite.
A change from overwhelmingly legal immigration from India to illegal immigration and remigration from other countries such as Canada, Britain, and the UAE (getting around the country caps). While most Indian immigrants to the United States arrive legally, 2019 estimates place the illegal Indian population at around 500,000.
Deliberately scaling up Indian immigration will make this even worse.
We can see the results of these sorts of changes in other Anglosphere countries such as Britain (where Indian IQ is around 93 and dropping and Indians flock into the informal, borderline Third World “Deliveroo” sector) and Canada. India is the #1 immigration source to these countries, which have seen skyrocketing housing prices and falling GDP per capita in recent years. And that would only be the beginning. Even Britain and Canada have fairly selective immigration systems. As Indian immigration ramps up, the average immigrant will approach the Indian mean4. Immigration makes the receiving country more like the sending country. Should America resemble India?
The Problem is Political
But that isn’t the most important reason to oppose Indian immigration. Economics in a post-Malthusian world is positive-sum; it is possible for everyone to be better off, or at least for the winners to win more than the losers lose. But politics is zero-sum. There’s a fixed amount of influence over the present and future state of society, and bringing in other political actors reduces your own. So anyone bringing in outside political actors ought to make sure that they are aligned with their own interests.
Ideology
Unless immigrants have precisely the same political views as the country they are arriving in, they will shift that country’s politics in some direction. Asians in general and Indians in particular5 are incredibly left wing in the United States – one of the most left wing groups in the entire country.
Another way of looking at the political consequences of elite Indian immigration to the United States is to look at the most important country historically run by Indian elites: India. During the Cold War, India was a Soviet ally in all but name, with a quasi-socialist economy known as the License Raj. Furthermore, India has the world’s oldest6 and most extensive system of affirmative action (predating the American version by about 20 years), the reservation system. This legacy of socialism and affirmative action is reflected in Indian-Americans’ political views.
If you think the United States needs less freedom-of-speech, more state regulation of the economy, more affirmative action, and more wealth redistribution, supporting Indian immigration is sensible7. If you believe the Great Awokening – the extraordinarily rapid political and cultural shift leftwards all around the world since 2012 – is a good thing and hasn’t gone far enough, you might want more Indians in the American elite8. If not, restriction must be a top priority.
Ethnic Conflict
Quite apart from their ideological beliefs, Indians are often hostile towards white people9. In the words of Suketu Mehta, an Indian-born NYU professor:
It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian Embassy, begging for a residence visa.
Does this man sound like the sort of person you’d want in America’s elite?
Psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani famously once gave a lecture at Yale called “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” where she proudly proclaimed her desire to murder white people.
I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.
Moving from anecdotes to polling data, 70% of Hindus and 79% of non-Hindu Indians believe white supremacy is a major threat to minorities in the United States. The obvious implication is that white people are the “enemy” and minorities need to work together to undermine them for protection.
It’s not surprising that Asians are the most likely of any race to say a declining share of white people in the United States is a good thing.
Indian ethnic conflict isn’t limited to viewing white people as potential rivals. India itself is the world capital of ethnocentrism, with a caste system so strict that it has managed to maintain near-perfect endogamy for thousands of years10. Caste discrimination is rampant and entirely rational; groups that don’t shut out qualified individuals from other groups watch their institutions get taken over and are themselves shut out in turn. Indians have been formed both culturally and genetically by this environment of intense zero-sum ethnic competition, and bring that mindset with them when they go abroad. A common pattern in the United States is for companies to hire Indians to get a leg up on the competition, only for them to take over and shut non-Indians out11.
Ethnic conflict of this sort is negative-sum; not only does it make non-Indians worse off, but in the long run, the resulting ethnic fractionalization of the market undermines meritocratic hiring and successful scaling of companies. India itself is the most extreme example of this phenomenon, but it is basically the default in multi-ethnic market societies. Having a society in which almost anyone was capable of slotting into the labor market in most niches was one of the West’s biggest advantages over its competitors.
Unlike political, cultural, or skill differences, which are very durable and never really go away, ethnic conflict can in theory be solved via intermarriage12. But Indian-Americans have the lowest rate of intermarriage of any major immigrant group in the United States; 80% marry other Indians, despite the significant sex-skew and comparatively small number of Indians13. As such, this ethnic conflict won’t disappear in the foreseeable future.
Even if every Indian was in perfect political alignment with the rest of America, this phenomenon alone would justify restricting immigration. Not admitting people that tend to dislike you, network among themselves, and hold deep historical grievances against your race is the bare minimum of any sensible immigration policy.
Why Indians?
Indian immigrants are very left-wing, often anti-white and, if the present extreme level of selection is relaxed, much less intelligent than the average American. Yet, as some of the charts I’ve included show, none of this is unique to them. So why focus on Indians, rather than non-Western immigration more generally?
Indians Are Elite
Indian-Americans are not just wealthy and well-educated14. They exercise enormous institutional power, especially for a group that has mostly arrived within the past 25 years. In the political realm, the Vice President is half Indian, and two of the major candidates in the Republican Party primary this year were Indians (Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy). An Indian, Sri Srinivasan, came very close to being appointed to the Supreme Court by Obama.
As Joe Biden would say, Indian-Americans are taking over the country, something that he himself has facilitated by appointing dozens of Indians to key positions. While not likely, it is plausible we could have a President of Indian descent within the next decade; Indians have already risen to the head of government in both Britain and Ireland.
Unlike East Asians, Indians excel at rising to leadership positions in large institutions. The default life cycle of American tech giants is that they are founded by white Americans and eventually helmed by Indian CEOs. Some of America’s largest and most important companies, including Google (and YouTube), Microsoft15, IBM, and World Bank Group (none of which were founded by Indians) are currently helmed by them, as was Twitter before Musk’s takeover.
Given the extreme importance of these companies (particularly Google, which is the #1 source of information for Americans) to American life, not to mention the immense amounts of money at their disposal and their close links to the government, Indian control over them gives Indians tremendous power16.
When reading about flagrant anti-white actions by huge companies like Microsoft or Google, such as Microsoft’s program to pay nonwhite employees more than the white ones with the same title, consider that they are run by members of an exceptionally left-wing and anti-white ethnic group.
Indian Immigration Has Many Boosters
There are several powerful lobbies for specifically Indian immigration. The first is the Indian ethnic lobby itself. As the second largest diaspora group in the United States, and one of the wealthiest and most politicized, the Indian ethnic lobby is quite strong. This is bolstered by the foreign Indian ethnic lobby; the Indian government views its diaspora as a secret weapon with which to influence the United States and other Western governments17, and as such strongly encourages immigration (for instance, by including increasing immigration as a prerequisite for a free trade deal with Britain). India has substantial leverage over the United States by virtue of its importance in containing China, so its position carries weight.
The second is Big Tech. As previously mentioned, many of the largest and most powerful tech companies in the United States are headed by Indians. Those that aren’t typically have many Indian employees in key positions such as hiring. And tech companies tend to lobby for more H1B visas (~75% Indian) to drive down their own labor costs. These companies are very influential and have no trouble throwing their weight around politically.
The third is pro-immigration commentators like Alec Stapp, who often bring up Indian immigration as something to be increased for the reasons given in the first section of the article. These types aren’t particularly numerous, but are disproportionately influential because they are intelligent, full-time political activists.
Thanks to these lobbies, a natural equilibrium for immigration restrictionists (in the absence of a deliberate focus on Indians18), is eliminating illegal immigration and greatly restricting low-IQ immigration, while ramping up legal Indian immigration – as has been done in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain. Embracing Indian immigration is the current position of the Republican Party mainstream19, and Indians are even more sought after by the mainstream right elsewhere in the Anglosphere.
In the long run this position is self-defeating, as high-skilled Indians move into positions of power and work to undo whatever restrictions previous governments have placed on low-skilled Indian immigration.
India Is A Practically Infinite Source
Lastly, India is the world’s most populous country and is incredibly poor. For all intents and purposes, it is an infinite reservoir of potential immigrants20, capable of demographically transforming America by itself.
This is not a self-limiting problem.
Conclusions
Indians’ elite status, potential numbers, and special interest lobbies make Indian immigration more of a threat than that of any other country and something that needs to be addressed21. In the absence of restrictionism, the default trajectory for the United States is something like what is happening in Canada. American institutions, headed by an ethnic group in which anti-white views are common, become even more anti-white than they already are. Eventually, the floodgates to India are fully opened and we enjoy all of the downsides of low-IQ immigration along with elite replacement.
But this is not inevitable. Indians are still only around 1% of the country; while they are already quite powerful, it is not too late for restrictionism. Indians do not have deep roots in the United States. 44% have arrived since 2010, and around 72% were not born in the United States. Even among citizens, a majority are foreign-born. They are not fleeing any sort of persecution, and native-born Indians have some of the lowest fertility of any ethnic group in the country. In the absence of constant reinforcements from abroad, Indian-American power will soon peak and decline.
Taking the first steps towards this by ending the H1B visa and greatly reducing student visas for Indian nationals should be the top priority for a future immigration restrictionist government, and if there’s an opportunity to fully rewrite the American legal immigration system, it should be revised with the goal of preventing further Indian immigration22.
By “basically apolitical”, I mean that aside from a small minority of leftists, almost everyone agrees, at least in theory, that prosperity is good and crime is bad. Other effects, such as the political marginalization of native Americans, are much more disputed.
Well, mostly. There are ways around the caps, like H1Bs, of which ¾ go to Indian nationals, but maximum legal immigration per country is still nearly fixed.
A common misconception online is that high-caste Indians have IQs on par with or above Europeans. This is not true; Brahmins as a group have average IQs only slightly above the Indian norm. It’s possible, and in my opinion based on their achievements likely, that some much smaller subgroups (such as Tamil Brahmins and Parsis) have IQs at or even above the European norm. But these groups are a tiny fraction of upper-caste Indians.
As, for instance, Mexican immigration already does.
As is often the case with diasporas, Indian-Americans are very left wing in the United States, but much more conservative when it comes to their home country.
With the arguable exception of the Soviet Union, though the Soviet nationalities policy was sufficiently schizophrenic that not everyone considers it affirmative action.
These aren’t the only issues where Indians are far out of step with most Americans, though I believe they are particularly important. Some other issues where Indians are left-wing outliers include defunding the police, immigration, climate change policy, and ending military support for Israel (notable because Indians in India are pro-Israel; the biggest ethnic conflict in India is Hindu vs Muslim, whereas in the United States it’s white vs nonwhite). Source (I advise reading the whole report if interested). Strongly ideological elite groups are vastly more influential than their numbers indicate, so Indian immigration will predictably move the country left on all of these.
Some of this may stem from a sense of resentment over the British Raj, the crimes and flaws of which are exaggerated and pinned on all white people. The idea that the British stole 45 trillion dollars and killed 100 million people in colonial India between 1880 and 1920 are common anti-white myths regularly circulated on the Internet.
By comparison, similar racial caste systems broke down in a matter of centuries in the Americas.
This process is described in depth with regard to New York City finance and consulting in Anita Raghavan’s The Billionaire’s Apprentice.
This is why intra-white ethnic conflict is no longer a major issue in the United States.
Since smaller populations will have more potential partners outside of their community, you should by default expect smaller groups to have higher rates of intermarriage. The massive increase in Asian immigration in recent decades has led to intermarriage rates among Asians falling, making them less likely to assimilate.
Elite status is sometimes treated as interchangeable with income or educational attainment. I think this is a mistake; it’s trivial to come up with groups that are much wealthier and better educated than their peers, but lack political power. South African whites, Ugandan Indians, Malaysian Chinese, and Jews in 1930s Germany all come to mind.
Given the potential of AI, these are arguably the two most important private organizations in the entire world right now.
For instance, pre-Musk Twitter’s broad-ranging censorship efforts were run by an Indian.
I am not suggesting running for election on a platform of limiting immigration from India specifically. General restrictionism is popular, singling out specific countries is not, and Indians are generally better received than Latin Americans or Muslims. I am suggesting that would-be restrictionists make restricting Indian immigration a top priority behind the scenes, and that the loose collection of intellectuals and pamphleteers that form the Internet right talk about it in those terms.
This is still a huge improvement over the pre-Trump Republican Party, which was basically pro-immigration from all sources.
The other major potential source of hostile left-wing elite immigration is China, but Chinese immigration is already dropping as more parts of the Chinese economy reach First World salaries and geopolitical tensions rise. Furthermore, Chinese fertility is extremely low and has been subreplacement for decades, while India’s only dropped below replacement a few years ago and thus has decades of demographic momentum baked in.
This article does not cover other arguments against Indian immigration, like the ~25 billion dollars a year in remittances from the United States to India or displacement of American STEM graduates, particularly programmers – not because these aren’t important or valid, but because they’re secondary. If Indian-Americans were evenly spread through the upper reaches of the American economy instead of concentrated in tech and didn’t send a penny home, restricting their entry would still be the correct decision. The same applies to problems originating with the Indian state, like espionage or subversion of American elections, as already happens in both Britain and Canada. These are bad, but at the end of the day the case against Indian immigration doesn’t hinge on it.
One way of doing this would be to set immigration caps per country based on GDP per capita. This would be a sensible and race-neutral policy, as the most reliable rule of immigration is that immigrants make their new country more like their old one.
Glad someone bit the bullet.
"A common pattern in the United States is for companies to hire Indians to get a leg up on the competition, only for them to take over and shut non-Indians out."
The meme is just as true in Britain.
I wonder if Hindu support for the Conservative Party, which is slightly less leftwing than Labour, is mostly explained by Labour being seen as the Muslim party.