The recent uproar in the United States over H-1B high-skilled work visas has exposed deep fissures within Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement at the very start of his second term as president.
Once celebrated as the “model minority,” the figure of the “Indian Tech-Bro” has now become a lightning rod for a bitter ideological rift. On one side are those clinging to the notion of the “good immigrant,” selectively embraced for their utility within America’s tech economy; on the other are MAGA’s ethnonationalist purists, for whom all immigration represents a threat. This unfolding debate is not just about policy – it is a mirror to the unravelling of a precarious political consensus, now laid bare in the cauldron of social media vitriol and ethnoracial contempt.
The Indian Tech-Bro has long leveraged economic mobility while navigating – if not entirely circumventing – the racial hierarchies embedded within the structures of a vast, interconnected global market, now more literate and prosperous than ever before. Yet, the rise of ethnonationalist right-wing populism – fuelling and feeding on the discontent of furious majorities who feel left behind amid a widening abyss of race, class, and education – has thrust this uneasy alliance into sharp focus. But how did we get here?
The rise of the Indian diaspora in the United States was no accident of history. It was a deliberate convergence of the global ambitions of a burgeoning class of educated Indians and America’s neoliberal experiment. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished longstanding national origin quotas for immigrants and fully opened the U.S. to Indian skilled professionals.” Engineers, doctors and scientists arrived in waves, their ambition sculpted by a “meritocratic ethos” rooted in India’s caste system, where education and hard work were valorised as markers of respectability. These immigrants didn’t just assimilate; they thrived, embedding themselves in post-industrial America’s knowledge economy and becoming the face of a globalised, market-driven meritocracy.
But this “meritocracy” has always concealed some darker truths.
The Indian Tech-Bro, heralded as the “model minority,” became a symbol of the neoliberal dream – a seamless fit into an America reshaped by Reagan’s neoliberalism and Clinton’s globalisation. Here was a diaspora that had aligned itself with the system, sidestepping the cultural conservatism of white America while embracing its economic aspirations.
The liberalisation of India’s economy in the 1990s and the rise of the dot-com era coincided to create an extraordinary moment of opportunity. Institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technologies – and later private engineering colleges – produced a steady stream of skilled workers, captivated by the mythos of tech moguls like Bill Gates. These individuals set their sights on Silicon Valley, seduced by the promise of a modern-day “Gold Rush” and the boundless potential of the booming US tech industry.
That promise, however, unravelled with the 2008 financial crisis. As economies in post-industrial Euro-America contracted and jobs in tech and finance vanished, discontent began to coalesce in the growing expanse of social media. Platforms like Reddit and 4Chan became incubators for grievances, where white nationalists, disillusioned members of the Indian diaspora, and aspirants within India found common ground. Their frustrations ranged from economic stagnation and cultural alienation to open hostility towards women and minorities. Together, they forged a transnational community bound by a collective sense of exclusion, railing against a world order that had once promised unimpeded progress but now seemed to offer only dislocation and disillusionment.
The H-1B visa programme became a crucial gateway for aspirational Indians seeking the American dream. While it elevated Indian professionals as symbols of global talent, it often tethered them to precarious employment, exploiting their labour under the guise of opportunity. The “model minority” myth – built on high incomes and academic achievements – granted Indian migrants visibility and privilege. Yet figures like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, hailed as icons of corporate success, mask the systemic inequities of the H-1B system, where many Indian workers face job insecurity, cultural alienation, and sometimes perpetuate egregious caste discrimination within Silicon Valley.
For Indian professionals, success in the US also came with a hidden cost. Their rise in the tech economy necessitated complicity in the country’s racial inequities. By avoiding engagement with these structures, they reinforced a system that elevated one racial minority while marginalising others.
Back home in India, the upper castes pursued a parallel consolidation of capital and power. Economic liberalisation in the 1990s dismantled the Nehruvian focus on peasants and workers, replacing it with market dominance and private wealth accumulation. The upper caste elite aligned these reforms with Hindutva politics, blending economic ambition with Hindu nationalism. This coalition championed domestic capital while resisting global competition, reframing economic liberalisation as a nationalist project.
This duality – the diaspora’s complicity abroad and the elite’s recalibration of power at home – reveals the enduring adaptability of privilege. Both projects exploited structural inequities to their benefit while evading accountability. Together, they offer a stark reminder of how power consolidates across borders and ideologies.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 crystallised these dynamics, exposing the tangled alliances that underpin modern populisms. Trumpism melded the grievances of white nationalists with a broader coalition of disaffected men, including upper-caste Indians whose frustrations with global power shifts resonated deeply with his rhetoric. Figures like Vivek Ramaswamy and Kash Patel became symbols of the Indian diaspora’s entanglement in the MAGA movement, enthusiastically amplifying Trump’s “America First” ethos. At the same time, Trump’s admiration for leaders like Narendra Modi underscored the growing synergy among right-wing figures globally, weaving white nationalism into the fabric of Indian diasporic politics.
The limits of this coalition were always apparent. And the tenuous alignment between Indian professionals and “America First” is now unravelling. The H-1B visa programme, once a symbol of mobility for Indian Tech- Bros and a driver of growth for American corporations, has become a battlefield. On one side, the technocratic elite – represented by Trump’s “government efficiency tsars” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – defends it as essential to global competitiveness; on the other, nativist forces see it as a threat to a white, Christian order. Now, the contradictions within this uneasy alliance are becoming impossible to ignore. Nothing exemplifies this more than the abrupt and unceremonious departure of Vivek Ramaswamy from the newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency”, just weeks after his appointment by Trump – a move that was celebrated by the MAGA-Indian coalition. His ousting lays bare the fundamental incompatibility between the corporate imperative for cheap, skilled labour and the outrage of the white nationalist commentariat over Ramaswamy’s remarks. If there was ever an illusion that these factions could cohere around a shared economic vision, it has now shattered under the weight of their competing interests.
This fissure reflects deeper tensions. While white nationalism hinges on restricting immigration to preserve an ethno-state, Indian professionals hedge their futures on programmes like H-1B, lured by the promise of the American dream. To aspiring Indian techies, this dream often comes with a pantheon of gods: Steve Jobs, the visionary, and Elon Musk, the maverick, figures revered as much for their myth-making as for their achievements. Many take on massive debts to study at US universities, hoping to convert F1 visas into H-1Bs and eventually Green Cards. Yet this same dream is inaccessible to much of Trump’s electoral base – disaffected white Americans who see themselves as casualties of liberal America’s misadventures.
The roots of this tension extend beyond the cold calculus of profit. For a time, shared grievances – discontent with globalisation, cultural alienation and Islamophobia – bound these groups together in a fragile alliance. But these commonalities have fractured under the weight of competing interests. The result is an uneasy coalition cracking under the weight of exclusion and racial resentment. Online racism targeting Indians neatly highlights this growing rift, as white nationalist priorities increasingly clash with the global ambitions of Indian migrants. What was once a pragmatic alliance now reveals itself as an irreconcilable contradiction.
The Indian diaspora’s resistance to white supremacy has long rung hollow, driven more by self-preservation than a genuine commitment to dismantling systemic racism. Much of this opposition has been performative, confined to online spaces and centred on defending economic privileges rather than advancing universal rights and justice. Beneath this facade lay a deeper complicity: Indian professionals thrived within systems that perpetuated white nationalist ideologies, reaping the benefits of structures that marginalised other immigrant groups. Indian tech workers, many groomed as the managerial elite through US universities, leveraged their positions to accumulate wealth and influence. However, as these contradictions sharpen, this alignment of privilege and silence may no longer hold.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
