ReportPolicyTechRepublican politicians have embraced anti-Indian racism — and it’s costing them votesSome Indian American conservatives say bigotry against their community has driven them away from the party they once supported.by Gaby Del ValleOct 22, 2026, 7:15 PM UTCShareGift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty ImagesReportPolicyTechRepublican politicians have embraced anti-Indian racism — and it’s costing them votesSome Indian American conservatives say bigotry against their community has driven them away from the party they once supported.by Gaby Del ValleOct 22, 2026, 7:15 PM UTCShareGiftGaby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge covering surveillance, the Department of Homeland Security, and the tech-right.Two years ago, University of Houston student Vasant Bhatt was doing everything he could to help Republicans regain power. He knocked doors for Sen. Ted Cruz’s reelection campaign and helped organize his community for Donald Trump, two victories he, like many other Republicans, celebrated in 2024. But this week, Bhatt did something unexpected: He voted for Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, and he publicly urged others to do the same.Bhatt, whose father is a small-business owner, tells The Verge he was initially drawn to the Republican Party due to its economic principles. “The strong belief in individual liberty and limited government,” he says, led him to identify as a conservative.
More recently, however, another aspect of his family’s experience has driven him away from the party. As an Indian American, Bhatt feels increasingly unwelcome in a party where racist rhetoric is becoming far too common.“There’s isolated individuals, but I think there’s an ecosystem as well,” Bhatt says. He has gotten used to people telling him to go back to India, but recently, he’s noticed anti-Indian racism increasing in both frequency and intensity. He wasn’t surprised when prominent conservative commentators replied to his post implying he’s not a real American.
The X account for the Waco Young Republicans accused him of voting “entirely based on his loyalty to a foreign people over Americans.”Indian Americans are reliable voters, with about 70 percent of the voting-eligible population showing up to the polls in presidential election years. And there were signs that the electorate was moving to the right, albeit only slightly: The percentage of Indian American voters who lean Democrat dropped from 59 percent in 2020 to 55 percent four years later. About one-third of Indian Americans supported Trump in 2024 — by no means a majority, but still a sign their votes were up for grabs. Since then, however, they’ve become a favored target for racist self-proclaimed “heritage Americans.” Both fringe and mainstream conservatives have portrayed Indian Americans as stealing high-paying tech jobs from white workers and undermining American unity.
Conservative commentator Chris Rufo — who rose to prominence by agitating against diversity efforts in public schools — even posted a video dissecting the so-called “Indian Question” in which he concluded that it’s “natural” for people to want to stick to their own kind. The right’s embrace of anti-Indian racism is now threatening to reverse Republicans’ recent gains with Indian American voters while promoting immigration restrictions that could shape the country for years to come.Bhatt began to notice the shift shortly after Trump’s 2024 victory but says it has become especially intense in the run-up to the midterm elections. In September, Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted a picture of hundreds of University of Texas fans celebrating a football victory. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” French wrote, referring to the fact that many students in the foreground appeared to be of South Asian descent. Some Texas Republicans condemned French’s racism, but French stood by his comments, and others have defended him.“Watching people like Jack Posobiec rationalize, excuse, minimize, and even prop up this rhetoric by defending folks like Bo French, I’m not really surprised,” says Bhatt.A few weeks after French’s comments, Vice President JD Vance used his announcement that the Trump administration would be reducing some tech companies’ ability to hire foreign employees as an opportunity to call workers on H-1B visas “foreign indentured servants.” India’s Ministry of External Affairs called Vance’s comments “deeply offensive.”Anti-Indian rhetoric has also translated into policy change.
The Washington Post notes that Republican politicians became more willing to engage in attacks on legal immigrants — including Indian Americans — after Trump’s immigration crackdown led to a drastic decrease in unauthorized border crossings. Now that Trump appears to have “solved” the problem of illegal immigration by shutting down asylum at the border, and has unleashed ICE on immigrants living in the country, nativists have found a new target in H-1B workers, many of whom are Indian immigrants.Since returning to office, Trump has raised the price of H-1B visas to upwards of $100,000 and waged a silent war on legal immigration, not only slashing the number of people who could legally come to the US but also sending naturalization rates plummeting. Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security now promote the idea of “remigration,” or forcibly returning immigrants to their countries of origin regardless of their legal status. The White House has even celebrated the fact that legal immigration has fallen since Trump’s return to office.
These policies are animated by a belief, prevalent among a faction of Republicans led by White House adviser Stephen Miller, that the problem with immigration isn’t whether people come to America legally, but what types of people come here. A growing chorus of “heritage Americans” see all non-white immigrants as incapable of assimilating to American culture, and they’ve selected Indians as their primary target.“I spent years within conservative politics, and I realized that my convictions don’t mean anything if I’m not going to be regarded as an American, or if I’m going to be regarded as a second-class citizen,” says Bhatt.Signs of the Republican Party’s anti-Indian turn have been percolating for years. Shortly after Trump selected Vance as his running mate, far-right streamer Nick Fuentes declared a “groyper war” on the Trump-Vance campaign. Fuentes, who is Mexican American, claimed that Vance’s marriage to an Indian American woman meant he “doesn’t value his racial identity.” In response, Vance denounced Fuentes, calling him a “white supremacist” — but that was all before the election.Trump’s 2024 inroads among voters of color, including Indian Americans, shocked pundits who expected that his nativist rhetoric and policies would drive Black, Latino, and Asian voters toward the Democratic Party.
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon even claimed MAGA had become a multiracial, working-class coalition — and he wasn’t entirely wrong. But in late 2024, as the GOP should have been taking a victory lap, two factions of the MAGA movement clashed over H-1B visas.The debate scrambled political alliances, with Elon Musk — a promoter of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — arguing that foreign-born workers are essential to American innovation. Though Musk is an immigrant himself, his comments received far less vitriol than those made by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who said H-1Bs are needed in part because American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Critics pointed to Ramaswamy’s comments as proof that Indian Americans — even those who, like him, were born in the United States — are incap
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