Georgia’s Khabar Magazine takes an in-depth an thought-provoking look at the Indian-American voter. The article addresses some of the chief reasons Indian-Americans don’t vote (can you believe that the fear of Jury Duty is near the top of the list?), as well as breaks down this voting group into five general types.
First, the why?? question:
Why donÂ’t more Indian-Americans vote? A basic theory shared by political scientists is as follows: the more money and education you have, the more you will vote and participate in politics. Indian-Americans are one of the most educated and wealthiest ethnic groups in the country. So, why is our voter turnout and participation so low?
An analysis by Ritesh Desai who serves on the Georgia Governor’s Asian American Commission sheds light on the jury issue at least:
The Department of Motor Vehicles is required to give their list to the Federal and State Jury services. In other words, if you drive in the State of Georgia you can be called for jury duty. Yet, this myth [voting enters you into the jury pool]is just one of the many fears I have heard from Indian-Americans who hesitate to register to vote because they think the government will interfere in their lives. If they are not fearful of the government, it seems voting is still an inconvenience.
Information from six voter registration drives broke down Indian American voters into the following 5 categories:
1) Ineligible, non-citizens who want to be voters
2) The citizens who never want to be voters
3) The faithless citizen voters
4) The blind citizen voters and donors who give and vote without understanding
5) The informed, citizen activist voters and donors
What are the top 5 issues for Indian-Americans?
Economy/jobs, healthcare, education, immigration and foreign policy.
Surprise. They are pretty much the same as every other voting group.
The biggest emerging schism I see within our community (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), which the article briefly touches upon, is the doctors vs. lawyers. Most Indian-Americans used to be indoctrinated to be doctors or engineers. Now that engineering has fallen out of favor with American-born desis, law has become a top option. The doctors have incentive to vote Republican, because of rising malpractice insurance rates, whereas the lawyers have incentive to vote Democrat, because they have the trial lawyers as a support base. A third group is the small business owners, many of whom are more recent immigrants as opposed to the other two groups. This group may find attractive qualities in each party and yet maintain a certain amount of loyalty to policies that benefit India first. If these conflicts indeed emerge, it seems that at least they will be based on issues and not on sub-cultures:
When it comes to issues, the responses from our survey participants demonstrated a consistency across religion, caste, and native Indian language. There is value in knowing that we have some issues that are common to us. The idea behind thinking as Indian-Americans rather than Maharashtrian-Americans or Punjabi-Americans is that we tend to think more politically when we unite as one community. When we are divided, we tend to think more about the culture and heritage we come from.
The stats are interesting. Of those who can vote, 20% are registered and presumably a smaller %age actually vote. That’s much lower than the ~50% U.S. turnout in presidential elections.
But, the linked story’s analysis is pretty weak. Other factors:
You only invest when you feel like you 1) finally realize you’re actually going to stay, 2) start to feel that politics really matter, 3) are confident that voting won’t hurt you, 4) feel culturally and socially engaged in your community and the nation.
U.S.-born desis should be voting at a higher rate, but political preferences are highly influenced by parents, so apolitical, work-centric parents often have apolitical, work-centric kids.
Bottom line, it’ll get better as assimilation progresses.
…not to mention that the parents most likely to have emigrated to the US were the ones who kept their heads down in India, studied, worked, and did their best to skirt under the radar of the hyperactive Indian political system.
With the first generation immigrants, I think a lot of it is just ‘surviving’, as it were. Working to make a living and a life in a new country may not leave much time for this sort of thing (and no I don’t mean the actual time it takes to vote, but creating the mental space where you realize it’s your duty to vote). Mental space? Eh, you know what I’m trying to get at anyway.
Also, voting relates to the concept of duty. American culture, in general, has the concept of civic duty, which I’m not sure is as well developed in the Asian American community. Duty to family and relatives and making a living first, before civic duty? Just a speculation, based on, well, speculation. So I could be totally wrong.
so apolitical, work-centric parents often have apolitical, work-centric kids.
…until they’re pumped full of marxist poison by leftist college professors, who convince them that the country that gave our parents such opportunity is actually “racist” against South Asians.
Google this: Alien land exclusion act, anti-miscegenation laws, Bhagat Singh Thind citizenship case.
good lord, Manish, I used the present tense: “is”.
I know some brown people from South Asia killed a lot more whites than vice versa, very recently. But yet you’re against collective guilt in that case and drudge up obsolete irrelevancies to contest the point that America is not currently racist towards SAs.
Somehow I doubt the Indians who came over here post-1965 ever suffered from any of that stuff. Given that they’re the vast majority of South Asians in the US, yeah, getting mad about stuff from decades or centuries ago is like some white guy being mad that another white guy kept his father as an indentured servant.
Bottom line: you really have to scrape the barrel to find examples of “anti South Asian racism” in the US. India is probably more racist towards whites than vice versa – witness the reception Sonia Gandhi got. South Asians have had tremendous opportunity here, and are one of the country’s richest ethnic groups. Blaming the US for being “racist” on the basis of generations old stuff in the face of Silicon Valley and Indian-American income levels is unrealistic and blinkered.
I know some brown people from South Asia killed a lot more whites than vice versa, very recently.
GC, what are you referring to here? I am truly perplexed? Recent history??
Abhi:
I’m referring to the deeds of the Taliban, bin Laden, and co. (Yes, I know the hijackers were mainly from Saudi Arabia, but their base of operations was in South Asia: Afghanistan/Pakistan).
Obviously it is wrong to blame all South Asians for the actions of bin Laden and co. Just as obviously, it is wrong to blame all whites or the whole US for actions taken against other groups of SAs in a different time and place. Given that the vast majority of SAs in the US never had to experience the stuff Manish dredges up (which was all pre-1965, which was when the flow of SA immigration started), his accusations are about collective guilt and nothing more.
In Manish’s world, white American guys are still culpable for the fact that Thind’s citizenship was turned down by the Supreme Court more than 80 years ago …but probably not for the fact that he did become a citizen:
My point is this: the SAs in the US have absolutely no right to complain about ancient history against other groups of SAs unless they are also willing to shoulder the blame for the recent actions of other SAs.
Your last comment just made me realize that there is no point to continue this string of comments to an enlightening end. Your mind is in an unreachable place. Although you seem to acknowledge the fact as a thin defense, South Asians had nothing to do with 9/11. Look up the term “CIA blowback” on google.
South Asians had nothing to do with 9/11. Look up the term “CIA blowback” on google.
Whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis? “CIA blowback” implies that we shouldn’t have aided the Afghans when the Soviets invaded. First, our current situation is a trade up from then – better to have a threat of one city nuked than the whole world nuked. Second, those guys should have been grateful. By your logic, the South Koreans should be bombing us because we helped them in the Korean War. The Somalis and the people we’ve fed – they should be strapping dynamite belts to themselves and blowing themselves up in NYC.
Blowback indeed. bah.
As for the involvement in 9/11: Pakistan’s ISI funded and trained the Taliban. South Asians were heavily involved in logistics, planning, etc. And Muslim South Asians have been found in terrorist cells in the US.
Obviously only a tiny tiny minority of SAs in the US is sympathetic to terrorism. But if you’re going to play the collective guilt game – blaming contemporary white Americans for the actions of other white Americans against other SAs 80 years ago – then you shouldn’t be surprised when the converse happens.
(btw, just in case you didn’t know, I am of Indian descent myself)
GC, Blowback isn’t about Afganistan in this case as much as it is about Israel and the rest of the corrupt regimes in the middleeast. That is a whole different topic. I did know that you were of South Asian descent. That’s part of the reason I exchanged comments with you as long as I did. This isn’t the sort of argument that can be settled over a blog. I prefer arguing about issues like this over a glass of beer or in a dark alley.
This isn’t the sort of argument that can be settled over a blog. I prefer arguing about issues like this over a glass of beer or in a dark alley.
Hahahahaa…well, a beer is fine by me.
My basic point is that the US isn’t racist towards South Asians, given that we have higher incomes/education levels/etc. than virtually any other ethnic group in the US. Prattling on about stuff that happened 80 years ago by people who are long since dead is like a Jewish American girl talking about how the Holocaust means she’s “oppressed”.
Re: 9/11…ok, you probably think it’s all Israel’s fault. That’s a long conversation; suffice to say that a) Israel was way down the list of bin Laden’s demands dnd b) the alternative to those corrupt regimes is and was fundamentalist Islam, not liberal democracy.
South Asians had nothing to do with 9/11.
Also, no matter what you may think about Israel as cause for 9/11, the above statement is flatly false. South Asians in Pakistan’s ISI funded and trained the Taliban. South Asians in Afghanistan were the Taliban, provided sanctuary to bin Laden, and fought with Al Qaeda against US forces.
Whether or not said South Asians were compelled to do so by their hatred for a tiny country thousands of miles away is different from whether they were involved in 9/11. On that point the historical record is irrefutable.
South Asia does not usually include Afghanistan, and neither does the term desi. Look at the statistics, gc. The vast majority of U.S.-directed Islamic terrorism is from fundamentalists from the Middle East.
Yes, it is, towards visible minorities like Sikhs and those in non-white collar jobs like cabbies, corner shops and convenience stand owners. You have a Silicon Valley bias, it’s not like that on the East Coast.
You assume status quo without accounting for immigration trends. It’s not bad for white collar workers, but that’s because of low numbers and a high degree of education. It will increase as:
Beyond explicit racism, there’s a lot of sheer cultural ignorance that needs to be swept away. Your definition of racism as only criminal assault and job discrimination is narrow to the point of being useless: you’re hardly living a full citizen’s life in a country you consider your home when you tell people, ‘As long as nobody took a swing as you, sit down and shut up.’
GC,
You wrote that “…’CIA blowback’ implies that we shouldn’t have aided the Afghans when the Soviets invaded. First, our current situation is a trade up from then – better to have a threat of one city nuked than the whole world nuked. Second, those guys should have been grateful. ….”
I’m afraid you’ve constructed a strawman here, GC. The argument isn’t that the Americans ought not to have aided the Afghans, covertly or overtly. Rather, the disagreement centers on the manner in which American structured the aid.
Quite simply, the mistake came at the point they outsourced it to the ISI–the result was a funding of the most fundamentalist of the ‘mujahideen’. Even worse, the tactics used by the ISI-aided groups were increasingly terrorist in nature, especially toward the end.
It’s this combination of the subsidy of jihadi groups along with the associated tactics of these groups which ‘blewback’ on lots of countries, among them Pakistan. Of course there were other countries which suffered immensely before 9/11, e.g., India.
Kumar
Kumar:
I agree with you that in retrospect the ISI was a bad group to fund. Calling it “blowback” implies that we deserved the consequences of fighting the Soviets, though. Usually the people with this line are the ones who think the Cold War wasn’t a just war, or that Communism wasn’t a threat, and so on.
I agree that in hindsight , the ISI was poison. But they were better than the Soviets at the time, and many of our other such bets worked out quite well. We bet on dictators in South Korea, Greece, Taiwan, and Chile (not to mention Gorby himself), and those bets came out all right as those countries didn’t suffer the economic destruction of communism and eventually liberalized. Credit is not generally given for those successes, which is why I don’t believe those critiquing the US support of “dictators” have much of a leg to stand on. Sometimes dictators and unsavory groups like the ISI are the only game in town, and Monday morning quarterbacking of such decisions does not usually cede that many such decisions were right .
Manish:
Yes, it is, towards visible minorities like Sikhs and those in non-white collar jobs like cabbies, corner shops and convenience stand owners. You have a Silicon Valley bias, it’s not like that on the East Coast…Your definition of racism as only criminal assault and job discrimination is narrow to the point of being useless:
1) Are you saying that SAs on the East Coast aren’t above the mean in education and income? If not, this “racism” seems to be totally intangible. You can’t actually measure it – you just repeatedly postulate that it exists. It’s not manifest in hiring statistics, voting ability, income figures, educational attainment, interracial marriage figures, or any objective metric whatsoever. To preempt the inevitable – as Suman Palit has shown, the hate crime epidemic is imaginary and only survives by bundling insults and arson in the same verbal package.
So the question arises: why is an educated engineer like yourself interested in claiming “victim” status? Why do you want to scapegoat whites and US society at large – exactly what concrete thing would you have that you don’t have because of “racism”?
Every race issue I can think of with objectively demonstrable disparate impact on SAs is leftist racism. Racial preferences and punitive redistributionary taxation are two. Consider for example this census data, summarized here:
Point: Asians have a heavier per-capita tax burden than any other group in the US. That is a concrete fact . Look at the data. What concrete numbers do you have to illustrate your claim that “racism” is a big problem for SAs?
2) I think your projections of increased racism are invalid. White-Indian intermarriage rates are 30% and rising. That means less ethnic activism, and more integration. Outsourcing will have about as much backlash on Indian Americans as anti-Japan rhetoric did on Japanese Americans (please, no Vincent Chin anecdote – he was 1 out of millions, and his case is hardly typical).
Second, I don’t know why you think it’s a good idea to import Indians on a merit-blind basis, especially if you believe that their presence will increase racism. Why take in revenue-negative immigrants? Is our immigration policy supposed to be in the national interest, or is it supposed to be charity? The US is not a world government in embryo.
3) I agree that the vast majority of Islamic terrorist cases in the US are by Muslims of Middle Eastern origin, but the fact remains that the ISI was intimately involved in 9/11, as others on this thread as well as yourself have ceded in the past by use of the term “blowback”. And the ISI is most definitely composed of SAs no matter how you slice it. Also, if you look at pictures of the average Afghan, they look indistinguishable from other South Asians.
4)
I think this is a counterproductive attitude. You try to sweep away people’s ostensible “ignorance” with PC re-education, and they will start to get annoyed. Far better to introduce them to culture by business without taking the feminist route, i.e. “that’s not funny!”.
Let me put it this way: Deepak Chopra, Vikram Seth, Yoga classes, Indian food, and Silicon Valley have done a heck of a lot more for the Indian image in the US than angry ethnic activist leftists. You have it exactly backwards if you think lecturing people on their racism is going to change their attitudes. It will just get their hair up. Sell something to them, write a book, or start a class – and then you might have something.
5) The bottom line is that for IA youth to complain about racism is like Jewish girls complaining that the Holocaust means they’re oppressed. It’s bizarre for some engineering graduate from Harvard to blast others for privilege. Thindh and the rest have about as much relevance to modern US SA life as pogroms in turn of the century Russia do to Jewish Americans….which is to say, none.
GC: Do you think that Jewish success in America means that there is no anti-semitism, and that there has been none?
Alan Dershowitz is a fine lawyer and professor, but his success doesn’t mean that he never faced anti-semitism. When he finished clerking for the Supreme Court, none of the major law firms would hire him — can you imagine that? Not so long ago, it was hard for a Jewish lawyer to get hired at a white shoe firm, even if he had the best qualifications in the nation.
GC:
Terminology: ‘Blowback’ I take to be simply shorthand for an unanticipated/unintended consequence of one’s action. So, I’ve never thought that America deserved ‘blowback’. Keep in mind that I listed other countries, including India, as suffering from such ‘blowback’ Given that India wasn’t responsible for the insurgency-ops in Afghansistan, it should be clear that I use ‘blowback’ in a purely descriptive sense.
Strictly speaking, whether the Cold War–as a whole–was justified is irrelevant to whether a particular ‘battle’ in that War was run properly, morally etc. The two are logically independent. But yes, GC, I too think the Cold War–overall–a justified response to Soviet imperialism.
My view of the ISI isn’t born of hindsight. Quite to the contrary, the usavory nature of the ISI and its ‘chelas’ was equally apparent then to any observer not blinded by worship of the ‘heroic’ mujahideen. I’m speaking here of the views of the ordinary man-on-the-street in, say, Jammu, ca. early to mid-1980’s. Certainly, if the CIA was unaware of the ISI’s nature initially, they were surely disabused of such naivete as the Afghan insurgency progressed.
Finally (!) to address the meat of your argument. Sorry, but you pose a false dilemma. ISI or the Soviets, you imply, was the choice faced by the CIA. Wrong, I think. The alternatives were really 1. ISI-run ops 2. ISI-run ops closely supervised by the CIA (i.e., the CIA not the ISI dictated who got weapons and training) 3. CIA-run ops 4. No ops or Soviets.
The CIA, in essence, got rolled by the ISI. The CIA (and the American exec. and legis. branches) underestimated then, and now, how much the ISI/Pakistan needs America. They could have driven a much harder bargain, then and now. They didn’t do so then, and I fear, haven’t done so now (Although there’s still some hope that America may drive a harder bargain now.)
Kumar
1) I think it’s untoward for wealthy, educated people to talk about how others have privilege. This means a South Asian engineer from Berkeley is saying that an Appalachian white with one third his income is “oppressing” him. Alan Dershowitz may have faced hiring discrimination (I know that Feynman did, and quotas on Jews in admissions were not so long ago), but contemporary Jews do not face any such discrimination.
Jews are heavily overrepresented at every elite university – see Hillel for stats on Jewish enrollment at every college. Harvard, for example, has 2000 Jews in their undergraduate population out of 6658 total undergraduates. As 65% of Harvard undergrads are Caucasian, that means 46% – almost half – of white Harvard undergrads are Jewish. So, no, I don’t think anti-Jewish discrimination is a big issue today.
2) In fact, anti-Semitism in the US is basically a non-issue. Consider:
The Irish were oppressed by the British in Ireland, but it’s bizarre for them to invoke that fact in the US. Similarly, it’s not reasonable for one of the most politically and economically powerful groups in the US – with high intermarriage rates over 50% – to complain about anti-Semitism in the US.
Kumar:
Actually, I think we agree far more than we disagree. To take your points in turn:
This is probably true. I have heard stories of young college Republicans wearing the garb of Afghans in much the same way young college Democrats today wear the kaffiyeh to show their sympathy for the Palestinians. In both cases it is based on a romanticization of Islamic fundamentalism.
These two statements to me put you with the reasonable opposition. Many people, however, will disagree that Communism was evil and insist that 9/11 was somehow an anti-imperialist strikeback for a mishmash of Vietnam + Latin America. Usually the term “blowback” signals this mindset (i.e., chickens coming home to roost as just-recomponse for our Cold War atrocities), which is why I sought to establish your position on these issues.
It seems that you are using the term in a very different sense, as an indication of a tactical mistake rather than a strategic one:
I think that 2) was the only reasonable option. Afghanistan is landlocked and we wouldn’t have been able to get those Stinger missiles in there without transiting through the USSR, Iran, China, or Pakistan. Of those four choices, we had to work with the Pakistanis as the other three were implacably hostile (the USSR most so, obviously!).
My problem is this… your call for “more oversight” implies that more CIA oversight would have meant less violent Islamic fundamentalism in the area later on. I don’t think that’s the case. Clearly Muslim terrorism was something independent of the CIA – look at Black September and all the other terrorist activity committed by non Afghan Arabs.
GC:
Islamist terrorism is indeed independent of the CIA. While a more closely CIA-supervised insurgency wouldn’t have made it disappear, I do think a reasonable case can be made that the extreme lethality of the current crop of Islamist terrorists could have been forestalled. Or, delayed at the least.
I’ll have to confine myself to a bare statement of the argument, for reasons of space. The latitude given the ISI in the Afghan insurgency allowed them to develop the capability to churn out terrorists and facilitate terrorism.
The ISI funneled aid and training to the most fundy Islamist groups, cutting off those less committed to the ISI’s pan-Islamist ideology (i.e.,necessarily anti-India, anti-Israel, anti-U.S.). It used that training to set up a jihad ‘assembly-line’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I would argue that this Pakistani ‘terrorist infrastructure’ facilitated the development of the current lethal jehadi-crop. This terrorist infrastructure was not available elsewhere in the world in the late 1900’s. And I think it unlikely that it could have been replicated elsewhere–certainly not on the gigantic scale of Pakistan, certainly not in the Arab world.
Trained terrorists aren’t created ‘ex nihilo’, GC. Local Arab schools didn’t churn out the volume of terrorists that the ones in Pakistan did. Recall that conservative estimates of the no. of terrorists trained in Afghanistan runs into the tens of thousands!
And it need not have been that way. Once again, yes, America needed Pakistan. But Pakistan needed/needs America just as much, if not more. A harder bargain could have been driven. I hope the same mistake doesn’t happen again.
Kumar
Trained terrorists aren’t created ‘ex nihilo’, GC. Local Arab schools didn’t churn out the volume of terrorists that the ones in Pakistan did. Recall that conservative estimates of the no. of terrorists trained in Afghanistan runs into the tens of thousands!
Well, yes, but virtually every state in the Middle East is a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has probably trained even more than Pakistan; Hezbollah is totally Iranian.
I guess what I’m saying is this: you presented four options above. 3) and 4) were unrealistic. We couldn’t have made it a CIA-only op due to geographical constraints (as mentioned above re: missile transit), and letting the USSR take another country was a very bad idea, for two reasons:
1) it would have extended communism’s time afloat by another decade at least (as plenty of russians have remarked, afghanistan was the ussr’s vietnam.) 2) had we not opposed it, the soviets would have driven to the gulf after consolidating in afghanistan – with very bad results for the world economy, world war, etc.
So we had to intervene. Thus you and I disagree primarily on this point:
Maybe delayed, but IMO not by a whole lot. At best we would still have had a lot of crazy, gung-ho Islamic fundamentalists with advanced weapons training. I mean, look at Iraq – we’re as hands on as it gets there, and we’re still having a hard time preventing the locals from signing up with the fundies.
The thing is that the Muslim world has been intimate with terrorism since Black September at least. It’s a universal thing with them. It’s not just Afghanistan – it was going on before that and in parallel.
I dunno. I don’t disagree with you that we could have and should be driving a harder bargain with the Pakistanis. As (bad) luck would have it, we keep having to deal with them – and our intervention is part of what keeps that corrupt kleptocracy from plummeting into the sewer. My (Indian citizen) uncle constantly talks about how “bin Laden is sitting in Musharaff’s palace”. And there may be something to that.
I guess my main point is that the “blowback” argument is not usually stated as narrowly as you have. There is a big difference between “the CIA pursued policies that may have sped up the rise of Islamist terrorism” vs. “9/11 was just recompense for helping the Afghans against the Soviets”.
GC:
Other uses of the term ‘blowback’ aren’t relevant to the argument I’m pursuing here, as you implicitly acknowledge. Btw, you may be right about the left-wing use of the term, but the narrow sense is quite common among Indian defense hawks. I can’t claim originality on that score.
The options I presented were meant to be logically exhaustive, i.e., all possible–certainly not equally prudent–courses of action that might have been taken in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
You underestimate the effects of not feeding the ISI-monster. The lethality of their assembly-line jihad is due to two factors: size and ideology. While Hezbollah/Bekaa Valley may approach the Pakistani jihadi schools in terms of size, their ire was/is primarily directed regionally (to Israel). The Bekaa Valley jihadi schools really haven’t gone into the global terror-export business, unlike the Afghan/Pakistan jihadi schools.
The pan-Islamist fantasies of the ISI were directly responsible for the global export of jihad, primarily as a means of extending Pakistani power. While the ISI has always nurtured such fantasies, the training, funding and opportunity provided by the hands-off American approach gave the ISI the chance to translate these fantasies into reality.
It’s interesting you mention Iraq. Most of the insurgents there–now numbering around 20,000, apparently–are native Iraqis. Al-Zarqawi, of course, is an example of a non-Iraqi. And, as you must know, he got his training (indeed, he ran a few training camps himself!) in Afghanistan.
Schooling matters rather more, I think. Even a delay in the onset of lethal-jihad would have been enormously beneficial to the world.
All this is to say that American policy in South Asia is screwed up, though less compared to the past. But that’s a post for another day.
Kumar