On September 13, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, wrote on X, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” referring to a photograph that showed a few dozen Indian American students celebrating the University of Texas’s football win over Ohio State. This resulted in a massive online debate, pitting Indian Americans and their defenders against the group’s critics. If it was happening in a vacuum, you might wonder if too much attention has gone to an obscure politician attempting to farm engagement. But the context for French’s post was a national debate about the nature of immigration to the United States, demographic change, and the role of Indians in America dating back to Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 day-after-Christmas tweet declaring that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” A few days after French’s post, Dallas-based commentator Kaylee Campbell shared a photograph of the National Merit Scholars at Heritage High School. The finalists were all ethnically Indian. Campbell went on to assert that Frisco, a suburb of Dallas, “is overwhelmingly Indian.”
“The rate of change has been noticeable, alarming even, in affluent Texas cities.”
Words have a meaning, and it is hard to support the proposition that Indians are overwhelming Frisco, the state of Texas, or the United States as a whole. But the rate of change has been noticeable, alarming even, in affluent Texas cities where tech workers congregate. Frisco and the Austin suburb of Cedar Park have seen Indian Americans grow from 1 percent of the population to as much as 30 percent and over 15 percent, respectively, in the twenty-six years since the 2000 census. This rapid growth from a low baseline is reflected nationally. Pew Research estimates there are about 5 million Indian Americans in 2026; that’s thirteen times the 387,223 counted in the 1980 US Census. In 1980, Indian Americans were 0.17 percent of the population. Today they are over 1.5 percent. Two-thirds of Indian Americans are born abroad, and more than half entered the country after 2010. If there is one thing we know about American history, the arrival of a new and foreign population will trigger a backlash. In the 1820s, about fifty thousand immigrants arrived from Ireland to the US. That increased to nearly 800,000 in the 1840s. This influx powered the rise of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party, which won 22 percent of the vote share in the 1856 presidential election. It also led to urban conflicts of the sort fictionalized in The Gangs of New York.