The community must press on with the aching business of assimilation — of showing how a country can change and still remain the same

Published on: Sep 19, 2026, 06:21:50 IST

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It seems that scarcely a week goes by without Indian Americans becoming targets of abuse. Whether they are attending a football game or building a temple, their place in the US is under increasingly hostile scrutiny. A recent Carnegie report, Indian Americans in a Time of Turbulence, found that, since the start of 2025, nearly half of those polled had frequently encountered racist social-media posts. Some of this harassment no doubt originates from outside the US.

But the animus clearly has a domestic base too. Snide remarks about Usha Vance’s family or Vivek Ramaswamy’s faith imply that, no matter their accomplishments, they are not truly American. What to make of such claims?

It is a mistake to brush aside nativism with the retort that America is a “nation of immigrants”. As Samuel Huntington pointedly observed in Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), America was founded not by immigrants entering an established society but by settlers creating a new one.

These settlers were predominantly white, English, and Protestant. They fashioned a distinctive Anglo-American political culture that emphasised constitutional government, religious faith and liberty, private enterprise, and individual responsibility.

Without the exertions of these “western sons of liberty”, as John Jay called them in The Federalist Papers, the US as we know it would not exist. Those who describe themselves as “heritage Americans” seek to underline this point. The term resonates because there is an elemental truth to it.

But the story does not end there. Successive generations that built America also believed that, in Thomas Paine’s words, America could be an “asylum for mankind.” They quarrelled over which immigrants to accept and in what numbers, fitfully opening and closing the door in response to fears and anxieties about identity.

But they were not oblivious to the “huddled masses” elsewhere (to use Emma Lazarus’s later evocative phrase). Nor were they oblivious to the challenge every republic confronts: how to continually acquire the labour, wealth, and talent needed to prevail over rivals.

The lesson they imbibed from historians such as Polybius, Tacitus, and Machiavelli was that Rome achieved lasting greatness because it was willing to admit outsiders to citizenship (whereas Sparta, which excluded them, came up short).

Such pragmatism has been an abiding feature of American statecraft. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, Alexander Hamilton argued that immigration would enlarge the country’s labour force and productive capacity. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln called immigration a “source of national wealth and strength.” The record supports their judgment: For instance, in 2012, immigrants were named in 40% of domestic patents.

Since the US was largely fashioned by Anglo-Americans, and succeeding generations were led by their idealism and pragmatism to encourage immigration from further afield, the question of what constitutes “Americanness” has recurred throughout the country’s history. The quandary that Indian Americans confront is that neither Democrats nor Republicans currently offer satisfactory answers to this question.

The Democrats champion multiculturalism: the idea that “traditional” identities and values should accommodate those of newcomers. This path offers minorities recognition. But, as Huntington warned, it also generates resentment when it downplays or even disparages the formative role of “Anglo-Protestant” culture.

In its more radical form, multiculturalism challenges the values — opportunity, merit, and family — that have contributed to America’s rise and made it attractive to Indian immigrants.

Little wonder, then, that per the Carnegie poll cited previously, the share of Indian Americans identifying as Democrats has dropped from 52% in 2020 to 46% in 2026, with the party’s drift toward the Left cited as a particular cause of concern.

The Republicans call for assimilation: the idea that immigrants should adopt and uphold traditional values. But then they divide over the question of what this involves. For some, “Anglo-Protestant” values are quintessentially civic in nature — Thanksgiving, for instance, can be celebrated by every American.

For others, these values are inextricably linked to race and religion, and, therefore, cannot be adopted. Historian HW Brands has aptly likened the debate to the philosophical puzzle known as the Ship of Theseus. It asks: If a ship’s original planks are gradually replaced, does it remain the same ship? The nativist identifies the vessel with its original planks and concludes that it has changed. The assimilationist argues that the ship remains the same so long as the new planks conform to the original design.

The hostility toward Indian Americans may owe partly to the rapid growth in their population, which has increased by 174% over the past two decades, rising from 1.8 million to 4.9 million, and is concentrated in particular regions of the country and sectors of the economy.

Similar anxieties have accompanied earlier waves of immigration. In his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), Benjamin Franklin worried that German settlers in Pennsylvania would become “so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them.”

But such precedents do not address the question that immigrants confront today. Europeans, once viewed as troubling aliens, were gradually incorporated as the boundaries of whiteness expanded and a broader Judeo-Christian identity developed.

The emergence of Asian Americans raises a new question: Can the “Anglo-Protestant” culture of generations past be understood as a civic and political culture that Americans of every race and faith can espouse?

This uncomfortable discussion can be avoided by embracing multiculturalism. Indeed, Carnegie’s poll showed a noticeable uptick in younger Indian Americans identifying as Democrats in 2026, reversing some of their movement toward Trump in 2024. But this is hardly a durable solution if multiculturalism undoes the very institutions and norms that helped Indian Americans advance in the first place. It is difficult to see how one of America’s most prosperous and educated immigrant groups will remain at ease within a Democratic Party that is, for instance, increasingly sceptical of individual liberty and personal responsibility.

The alternative is for Indian Americans to press on with the aching business of assimilation — of showing how a country can change and still remain the same.

This can take many forms, including generational changes in accents and fluency, the softening of customs, intermarriage, and civic involvement. These processes are already well underway. The growing visibility of Indian Americans, especially in Republican circles, is partly why they are the subject of such intense scrutiny.

With time, symbolic moments — that encapsulate how traditional values can find new expression — will come too: The quiet grace of the Second Lady today, an extraordinary sacrifice on a distant battlefield in the future.

In the meantime, the slurs will continue to be heard, as they were by earlier generations of immigrants, who nevertheless persevered, sustained by an abiding faith in an American tomorrow.

Rahul Sagar is a Global Network professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. His latest book is The Birth of Indian Liberalism. The views expressed are personal

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