Last week, a user on X (formerly Twitter) named Daniel Keene posted footage, filmed while he was driving around his Dallas suburb, showing a small crowd of South Asian neighbors congregating on the street, apparently for a Hindu festival. “Typical view in my neighborhood,” Keene fumed in his post. “We have to cancel the H1-Bs. I want my kids to grow up in America. Not India.” (“H1-Bs” was in reference to one of several programs that allow firms to bring foreign workers to fill specific needs.) The post garnered nearly 3,000 “reposts,” 22,000 likes, and 5 million impressions. Such overt expressions of racial animus are typical of the platform under Elon Musk’s reign (as is anti-Semitism).
Yet this particular animus — hostility to Indians and Indian-Americans — isn’t “just” an online shitposting phenomenon. It reflects the Right’s shifting reception of South Asians: from an affluent, hard-working minority to a group that takes your jobs and despoils your neighborhoods.
Conservative influencers and politicians have decided that Indian immigration is a problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to say that too many Indians coming in as H-1Bs is a reason to be against the program. Ingraham herself warns that “any trade deal with India will require us to give them more visas.” Steve Bannon has similarly called for a complete halt to the H-1B program, saying “instead of stapling a green card to their diploma, staple an exit visa.”
This is a strange development. Conservatives have long recited a litany of complaints about immigration, and none of them appears to apply to Indians. Conservatives worry about illegal immigration showing contempt for the law, or low-skilled new arrivals committing crimes or becoming dependent on welfare. There are often complaints about a failure of assimilation or the threat of terrorism from Muslim arrivals. But Indians are among the highest earning ethnic groups in the country. According to one study, they make up less than 2% of the population, but pay 5% to 6% of all federal income taxes. Their crime rate is negligible, and there is no history of them committing terrorist attacks or contributing to anti-Semitism.
This leaves the wages argument, which rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The idea that wages need to be protected from competition rests on what economists call the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, which assumes that there is only a set amount of work to be done. On the contrary, economists have found that new arrivals increase jobs by boosting aggregate demand, and can contribute to the expansion of an industry.
It is common for people to fall for economic fallacies, and this doesn’t always involve them having racist motivations. Yet the way this one is selectively applied to Indians suggests that the roots of such views lie elsewhere. For example, even if conservatives believe in the lump-of-labor fallacy, why do they then spend their time complaining about migrants who don’t work?
Imagine someone waved a magic wand and a large share of the Latino immigrants whom conservatives have traditionally opposed suddenly started getting higher standardized test scores and became tech workers. Wouldn’t everyone agree that this is a desirable outcome? Conservatives are having it both ways: people who don’t work or are in low-wage jobs are harming the country because they use welfare; people in white-collar professions are harming Americans because they compete in the labor market. This is broadly an anti-human way of looking at the world, one which would suggest that public policy should be aimed at shrinking the population, and that there is basically no way any group of newcomers could ever make a contribution to the country. Heads we win, tails they lose.
Yet conservatives are usually not zero-sum thinkers in other contexts. They are mostly for higher birth rates, free markets, and economic growth. How to explain this discrepancy? What we are witnessing is the Groyperification of the GOP: its spiritual takeover by the followers of the admittedly racist and anti-Semitic online personality Nick Fuentes, who wields a vast influence on Zoomer men, especially.
Anyone who has spent any time engaging in Right-wing circles online knows that there is a fanatical hatred of Indians, which erupted around Christmas in a long-running argument on H-1B immigration between Elon Musk and X personalities who had previously been in his camp. Memes about “street shitters” — the notion that Indians defecate in public — are a dime a dozen, and garner hundreds and sometimes thousands of likes.
“Conservatives have long recited a litany of complaints about immigration, and none of them appears to apply to Indians.”
Due to this energy, mainstream-media figures, activists, and politicians on the Right are going where the most excited portion of the base is. Laura Ingraham wants viewers; Bannon is reportedly gearing up for his own presidential run; and Ron DeSantis wants to be covered favorably by figures like Ingraham when he runs for president again. The online Groyper in the comments section is at the bottom of this pyramid. His arguments might have to crawl out the gutter and be made presentable before they’re ready for Fox News or a presidential debate stage. But in the end, he gets what he wants.
As someone who grew up familiar with the leading lights of the American conservative movement, it was particularly striking for me to hear people like Senator Eric Schmitt discussing immigration as a threat to future generations of Americans, for no other reason than that they compete for jobs. One of my first exposures to economics was reading the books of Thomas Sowell, the celebrated conservative intellectual, who eviscerated the anti-human philosophy of famed environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, a zero-sum thinker known for population-control arguments based on ecological considerations. Still today, tributes to Sowell and dunks on Ehrlich are regularly seen on X. Yet now, conservatives regularly reach for Ehrlich-type arguments to argue against Indian immigration.
The best way to understand the development of anti-Indian attitudes is as part of the broader trend in which small but highly motivated extremist factions online end up shaping the conservative discourse. Groypers in particular are a relatively small group of activists, but they’ve proved capable of pushing around major figures in the movement.
The New York Times just profiled Fuentes, noting that officials and advisers to the administration “would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers.” There is a common understanding that this is where the energy of the party is, and anyone who is not a Groyper or white nationalist must tread carefully when discussing the movement. While open racial hate is still taboo in Republican circles, nobody with national ambitions can take a position in favor of high-skilled immigration at odds with the views of white nationalists.
This dynamic is crucial to understanding why Indians have become a target. The typical normie Republican doesn’t particularly dislike Indians. But the online Right does, and it produces an endless stream of propaganda reframing anti-Indian sentiment as economic populism — talking about wages and corporate power instead of openly expressing racial animus in the style of Fuentes and other white nationalist influencers. Regular Republicans encounter these ideas in Fox News clips or election-season talking points, without ever realizing their origins in online subcultures.
The story of how opposition to Indian immigration became standard in Republican discourse is a microcosm of what has happened to the right more generally.
More typical GOP voters may still think of themselves as simply conservative, patriotic, or skeptical of elites. But they are operating in a discourse increasingly structured by online extremists. The same way Ron Paul’s internet following fed into the Tea Party, how birtherism and fear of demographic change fed into Trumpism, or how conspiratorial thinking about Epstein and QAnon narratives bled into the GOP mainstream, the anti-Indian rhetoric reflects a fringe obsession metastasizing into national politics. Similarly, while the Covid vaccines were once championed by every major Republican politician and supported by the majority of the public, no ambitious Republican would dare say a positive word about them today.
The process works because there simply isn’t much of an audience pushing in the other direction. The largest Right-wing influencers display some combination of adherence to the Trump Cult, hostility to outsiders that has roots in white-nationalist sympathies, and proneness towards conspiratorial thinking. Intellectuals and influencers partial to classical liberalism, technocracy, or old-school conservative principles have much less power. In the end, it’s all about the audience. The Right, increasingly the home of the distrustful, paranoid and less educated, without serious newspapers or intellectual influences, is drawn to racist and conspiratorial thinking, which is constantly being laundered through new arguments into the Republican mainstream.
Opposition to Indian immigration is a clarifying issue. When it comes to Chinese arrivals, there is at least a national-security concern one can point to which, if sometimes pretextual, isn’t completely devoid of reason and contrary to supposed conservative principles. With Indians, however, we confront a perfect group for testing whether conservative opposition to immigration has a rational basis or is ultimately rooted in the lowest forms of bigotry.
If you think that Republican politics will go back to something close to normal after Trump, this issue also serves as a wakeup call. Pay attention to what goes on in the comments section on X, and what gets discussed on Nick Fuentes’s livestream. If you do, you’ll get a glimpse of the future of conservatism, and the kinds of rhetoric and policies Republican normies will be supporting before long.
