If Donald Trump’s running mate senator JD Vance makes it through the presidential elections in the US this year, for the first time an Indian American and practising Hindu, Usha Vance, will become a vice-presidential spouse.
In case Biden leaves the 2024 race, Kamala Harris would be his likeliest replacement, which would give Indian Americans their first presidential nominee. So, in either case, it is win-win for the Indian American community in the States.
The Indian American community has emerged as a political powerhouse over the past decade. Kamala Harris in 2021 became the first person of Indian descent, as well as the first woman and Black person, to be vice president. The 2024 presidential cycle is the first one to have featured two Indian American candidates in Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
And there are now five Indian American members of Congress and nearly 40 Indian Americans in state legislatures — the highest number of any Asian origin group in the country, according to AAPI Data, an organization that collects data about Asian Americans.
They recently surpassed Chinese Americans to become the largest Asian group in the United States among people who identify with one country of origin, according to a census report released last year. In 2020, nearly 4.4 million people identified as solely Indian. (Chinese people are still the largest group when counting those who identify with multiple countries of origin.)
Most Indians came to the United States after 1965, when a new immigration law removed restrictions that had excluded Asians, Africans and others from the country. The Indian population in the United States has spiked in recent decades, in particular, as American companies in the booming technology sector have sought to hire large numbers of software engineers and computer programmers, drawing some of India’s most-educated workers. About 60 percent of Indians in the United States today arrived after 2000. In recent years, the number of Indian migrants illegally crossing the southern border has also spiked. As of 2021, about 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants were in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center.
Among Asians in the United States, Indians are the wealthiest and most highly educated origin group on average. And on almost every measure of political and civic engagement, Indian Americans rank at or near the top among Asian groups, a fact that experts largely attribute to their roots in a country with a strong democratic tradition and high usage of English.
The population boom has been a recent phenomenon. When Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, arrived in 1958 to pursue a graduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, she was one of only 12,000 Indian immigrants living in the country.
Many Indians who immigrated after the 1965 immigration act came to pursue higher education. After completing their studies, many Indians found jobs and were sponsored for legal permanent residency by their employers. Others were brought to the US by companies and institutions to perform high-skilled jobs.
Vance’s father, Krish Chilukuri, is a mechanical engineer who studied at the Indian Institute of Technology. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a biologist and now provost of a college at the University of California, San Diego.
They raised Vance and her sister, Shreya, in Rancho Peñasquitos, an upper-middle-class suburb of San Diego, speaking Telugu and English at home. The Chilukuris were part of a close-knit group of six families from southern India. Many of the adults were engineers or educators.
The women were avid readers and would often gather to discuss novels, while the men traded tips for growing tropical fruits like guavas and mangoes.
Like many first-generation immigrants, the Chilukuris have not been especially vocal about politics. But like most Indian Americans, Vance’s parents are Democrats, according to recent voter registration records. In 2017, Lakshmi Chilukuri was also one of more than 2,300 California professors who signed an open letter to Trump, urging him not to withdraw from the Paris accords on climate change.
Since at least 2008, Indian Americans have long seen the party as more tolerant of different faiths and ethnicities, and more supportive of safety net policies they valued in India. Over the years, the Democratic Party has also invested considerable resources in trying to appeal to Asian American voters.
But Indian American support for President Biden has declined, and more Indian Americans are identifying as independents. Vance herself is something of a political enigma. She was a registered Democrat until at least 2014, according to an online database that includes voter registration records. Even as her husband has gone from a “Never Trump” critic to a fervent supporter of Trump, she has said little publicly or privately about her own politics.
People say, Usha’s heritage and identity appear to be at odds with her husband’s and the larger party’s politics, specifically the implicitly racist and explicitly xenophobic parts. Usha introduced herself and her husband at a Republican convention, after speakers spent most of the previous day hammering home anti-immigrant rhetoric, some dipping into extremist fear-mongering and accusing immigrants of rape and murder. Despite previously insulting Trump, her husband’s political stance has, of late, closely resembled the former president’s sentiment.
While she spoke, the audience waved “mass deportation” signs — ostensibly not directly at her but in support of the general anti-immigration stance of the Republican platform. Perhaps it’s not surprising that far-right Republicans have begun attacking Usha and denigrating her and her husband’s mixed-race family.
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