Racism has raised its ugly head on X (formerly Twitter). This time, it is the white-supremacist segment of Donald Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) gang, targeting Indians, especially those coming on H1B short-term visas to work in the high-tech sector in Silicon Valley.

That the MAGAs are racists is not surprising – African Americans, Latinos and Arabs have long been targets of their vitriol.

However, Indian-origin STEM graduates, serenaded by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his presidential candidate of choice, Donald Trump, are a surprisingly new target group. Surprising, because Trump has surrounded himself with several high-profile members of the Indian diaspora –Vivek Ramaswamy will head the Department of Government Efficiency along with Elon Musk, Kashyap “Kash” Patel has been appointed to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Stanford Medical School Professor Jay Bhattacharya will soon helm the National Institutes of Health, a research funding body that spends close to $45 billion on healthcare research every year.

But the appointment of Chennai-born Sriram Krishnan as Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence seems to have rubbed the MAGA crowd the wrong way. X has been throbbing with attacks on Indian techies in particular and immigrants from the country in general.

As an Indian, I had long ago taken racism to be a given. It begins at home, from our own people –owners of unofficial “white-only” restaurants and guest houses politely refusing service in Gokarna, Benares or any tourist haven popular amongst Zionist hippies discovering Yoga and mysticism after their mandatory military stint.

In Europe, I have had the unique experiences of having kids singing “Jai Ho” (from Slumdog Millionaire) at me in a supermarket aisle in Cergy, of waiters in Paris’ Latin Quarters making mocking namaste gestures as I walked past their tourist traps, of a professor’s husband doing an impression of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon (from The Simpsons) after meeting me at a party, and of a hostel owner in Athens requesting me to change my bunk bed so that I could be in the same shared room as his other Indian tourists (“…be with your own country persons,” as he put it).

So, imagine my surprise when I suddenly discovered a world where my brown skin and odd accent were somewhat of a superpower.

Robyn (name changed) was a fellow student at graduate school in France. One day, she came to me, asking for help in reinstalling Microsoft Windows on her laptop. I was surprised – back home in India, I was the technologically challenged one begging my tech nerd friends to help me with computer troubles. Our school had a well-equipped and competent IT support department who also spoke English, and I had myself availed their services many times.

“Why me?” I asked incredulously.

“I just think you can help me,” she said, offering to treat me to a free meal.

Turns out I could indeed help.

Because all I did was to insert the Windows Installer DVD into the drive, and press the “next” button for about 45 minutes, and voila, lunch was in the bag!

A few months later, I got to visit the United States for an academic conference in Boston. This was an eye-opener, as several people of Indian origin have made it big in business academia. My Indian ethnicity suddenly had me stereotyped as an academically bright prospect with computer and mathematical skills, and I did not have to slow down my speech, for people to understand my Indian accent here.

I came back to America as a visiting graduate student, this time in State College, a small university town in Pennsylvania. Unlike Paris, Indians were treated very differently here, with many graduate students and prominent professors being of Indian origin. This is when I got to know about the “model minority” trope.

Marketers are familiar with a consumer behavior theory called the country-of-origin effect. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Why you aren’t buying Venezuelan chocolate,” marketing academic Rohit Deshpande outlines how stereotypes associated with countries can affect consumer perceptions of products from there. There is a reason that we seek Swiss watches, German cars and French wine, and not Italian beer, Bangladeshi cellphones or Norwegian spices.

Country stereotypes however, are not static, and conscious efforts by brands can change stereotypes over the years.

Japanese and Korean automobile brands, for example, were poorly regarded by American consumers in the ’70s and ’80s, but conscious actions like continuous product development, providing superior after-sales service, upscale branding, and more.

Indian IT services companies and their employees too have faced significant challenges in the ’80s and early ’90s due to stereotypes associated with India, but continuous process innovation and consistent performance by many Indian players have today earned the Indian IT services industry a positive country-of-origin perception in America.

Indian engineers are now a prized commodity in the US, with many companies allegedly preferring them over similarly qualified people from other ethnicities.

Country stereotypes can be a double-edged sword. While American actor Kalpen Modi famously had to change his name to Kal Penn to find his bearings in Hollywood and many of his Gujarati brethren are stereotyped as 7-11 clerks and motel operators, the STEM graduates in the university towns, Silicon Valley and Wall Street now face no such problems.

Graduates of our engineering schools are in great demand in the tech sector. CEOs like Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Google, Arvind Krishna of IBM and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe rub shoulders with Srikant Datar, Dean of the Harvard Business School and Arvind Raman, dean of Purdue University’s College of Engineering in the top echelons of industry and academia.

The brightest students from across the world vie for admission to the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas, Dallas and the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University, both of which have been endowed by wealthy Indians (Naveen Jindal is an Indian politician and industrialist, while Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon are American entrepreneurs).

Indians are the amongst richest ethnic groups in the United States today, with a burgeoning influx of highly qualified STEM graduates staffing the tech sector.

The racist outburst against Indians by the MAGA crowd brings back memories of different times. Of dotbuster thugs who terrorised bindi-sporting Indians in the ’70s and ’80s in New Jersey. Of hate crimes against Muslims and Sikhs after 9/11. Of racist barbs against Republican politician Bobby Jindal, striving to move up the political ladder.

The MAGA movement is not new. “Make America Great Again” has been Donald Trump’s dog whistle to his white-supremacist fanbase ever since he first campaigned for, and won the US presidential election in 2016. However, the rhetoric had been skillfully restricted to illegal immigrants, mainly from Latin America and a few war-torn countries in Asia and Africa.

In its current form however, the MAGA movement is bolstered by Elon Musk, whose high-tech ventures require large numbers of skilled engineers. It has also found support from Vivek Ramaswamy, an eccentric entrepreneur who challenged Trump in the Republican primaries in early 2024.

Vivek Ramaswamy is a walking and talking stereotype of the “high performing” Indian. Every Indian STEM graduate knows at least one character like Ramaswamy (if you are not a STEM graduate, recall the character of Chatur Ramalingam in Rajkumar Hirani’s film Three Idiots). He is a Harvard graduate with a JD from Yale Law School. An entrepreneur. A tennis ace. He even plays the piano. If he were actually Indian, Ramaswamy would not only have cracked the IITJEE, NEET and CLAT, but also aced the criteria for the “well-rounded” candidate that the Indian Institutes of Management seek.

Ramaswamy caught the world’s attention as a surprise contender for the Republican ticket in the 2024 Presidential elections, ticking almost all the boxes that please the MAGA crowd – an anti-illegal immigration stance, pooh-poohing the idea of gender and race-based diversity and inclusion, an obsession with STEM meritocracy, and a chest-thumping “America-first” rhetoric.

And yet, Ramaswamy may not be American enough for his own constituency. In a shockingly frank interview, conservative commentator Ann Coulter admitted that despite admiring him, she would not vote for him because he was Indian. Coulter’s comment may have angered the Indian diaspora across the world, but it underlines a hard and uncomfortable truth – that a racist bully always remains a racist bully, and will always remain a racist bully, despite any attempts to ingratiate them.

Vivek Ramaswamy has done himself no favours. He has dived right into the H1B flame war on X, and in a comically toxic post, claimed that the American culture that favors prom queens and sports jocks, has made them weak as compared to the immigrants who push their children to excel in academic pursuits, leading to further outrage from his conservative fans-turned-haters, with their sepia-tinted memories of high school in Anytown, USA.

Yet, Ramaswamy’s views are not uncommon amongst Asian immigrants in the US. Law professor Amy Chua’s 2011 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, drew a lot of fire from critics, because it laid bare a strict disciplinarian approach to parenting, that many Americans found to be borderline abusive. Sitcoms like Fresh Off the Boat and Never Have I Ever have also explored a culture clash between Chinese and Indian Americans who are driven to become doctors and engineers, and their less competitive “American” peers.

Indian H1B holders and aspirants are themselves in a fix. With nationality-based caps on H1B visas, many Indians are in a Green Card queue for close to two decades; for new applicants, the expected wait times could be as high as 50 years, restricting their mobility, career growth and often, entrepreneurial aspirations in The Promised Land.

For a variety of reasons, Indians far exceed any other nationality in the Green Card waitlist, and many saw Trump, with his anti-illegal and pro-legal immigration rhetoric, as their messiah. When Trump takes office, how will the more populist “America-first” approach play out?

Will Sriram Krishnan, Vivek Ramaswamy and Kash Patel manage to swing the needle in the Indians’ favour? Or will they return to a brave new Viksit Bharat, and spur technological disruptions like 10-minute grocery delivery, UPI and Digiyatra, from Bangalore, Gurugram and GIFT City instead?

Prithwiraj Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad University. Opinions expressed here are personal, and do not reflect those of his employer.