Indian Americans
Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from India. The terms Asian Indian and East Indian are used to avoid confusion with Native Americans in the United States, who are also referred to as "Indians" or "American Indians". With a population of more than 5.4 million, Indian Americans make up approximately 1.6% of the U.S. population and are the largest group of South Asian Americans, the largest Asian-alone group, and the second-largest group of Asian Americans after Chinese Americans. The United States hosts the largest Indian diaspora by population, though not by percentage.
The Indian American population started increasing, especially after the 1980s, with U.S. migration policies that attracted highly skilled and educated Indian immigrants. Indian Americans have the highest median household income and the second highest per capita income among other ethnic groups working in the United States. "Indian" does not refer to a single ethnic group, but is used as an umbrella term for the various ethnic groups in India.
Terminology
In the Americas, the term "Indians" has historically been used to describe indigenous people since European colonization in the 15th century. Qualifying terms such as "American Indian" and "East Indian" were and remain used in order to avoid ambiguity. The U.S. government has since coined the term "Native American" in reference to the indigenous people of the United States, but terms such as "American Indian" are used among indigenous as well as non-indigenous populations. Since the 1980s, Indian Americans have been categorized as "Asian Indian" by the U.S. Census Bureau.While "East Indian" remains in use, the terms "Indian" and "South Asian" are often chosen instead for academic and governmental purposes. Indian Americans are included in the census grouping of South Asian Americans, which includes Bangladeshi Americans, Bhutanese Americans, Indo-Caribbean Americans, Maldivian Americans, Nepalese Americans, Pakistani Americans, and Sri Lankan Americans.
History
Pre-1800
Beginning in the 17th century, members of the East India Company would bring Indian servants to the American colonies. There were also some East Indian slaves in the United States during the American colonial era. In particular, court records from the 1700s indicate a number of "East Indians" were held as slaves in Maryland and Delaware. Upon freedom, they are said to have blended into the free African American population, considered "mulattoes".19th century
In 1850, the federal census of St. Johns County, Florida, listed a 40-year-old draftsman named John Dick, whose birthplace was listed as "Hindostan", living in city of St. Augustine. His race is listed as white, suggesting he was of British descent.By 1900, there were more than 2,000 Indian Sikhs living in the United States, primarily in California. At least one scholar has set the level lower, finding a total of 716 Indian immigrants to the U.S. between 1820 and 1900. Emigration from India was driven by difficulties facing Indian farmers, including the challenges posed by the colonial land tenure system for small landowners, and by drought and food shortages, which worsened in the 1890s. At the same time, Canadian steamship companies, acting on behalf of Pacific coast employers, recruited Sikh farmers with economic opportunities in British Columbia.
The presence of Indians in the U.S. also helped develop interest in Eastern religions in the U.S. and would result in its influence on such American philosophies as transcendentalism. And Swami Vivekananda's presence at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 led to the establishment of the Vedanta Society.
20th century
Escaping from racist attacks in Canada, Sikhs migrated to Pacific Coast U.S. states in the 1900s to work in the lumber mills of Bellingham and Everett, Washington. Sikh workers were later concentrated on the railroads and began migrating to California; around 2,000 Indians were employed by the major rail lines such as Southern Pacific Railroad and Western Pacific Railroad between 1907 and 1908. Some white Americans, resentful of economic competition and the arrival of people from different cultures, responded to Sikh immigration with racism and violent attacks. The Bellingham riots in Bellingham, Washington on September 5, 1907, epitomized the low tolerance in the U.S. for Indians and Sikhs, who were called "Hindoos" by locals. While anti-Asian racism was embedded in U.S. Politics and culture in the early 20th century, Indians were also racialized for their anticolonialism, with U.S. officials, who pushed for Western imperial expansion abroad, casting them as a "Hindu" menace. Although labeled Hindu, the majority of Indians were Sikh.In the early 20th century, a range of state and federal laws restricted Indian immigration and the rights of Indian immigrants in the U.S. Throughout the 1910s, American nativist organizations campaigned to end immigration from India, culminating in the passage of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act in 1917. In 1913, the Alien Land Act of California prevented non-citizens from owning land. However, Asian immigrants got around the system by having Anglo friends or their own U.S. born children legally own the land that they worked on. In some states, anti-miscegenation laws made it illegal for Indian men to marry white women. However, it was legal for "brown" races to mix. Many Indian men, especially Punjabi men, married Hispanic women, and Punjabi-Mexican marriages became a norm in the West.
Bhicaji Balsara became the first known Indian to gain naturalized U.S. citizenship. As a Parsi, he was considered a "pure member of the Persian sect" and therefore a "free white person". In 1910, judge Emile Henry Lacombe of the Southern District of New York gave Balsara citizenship on the hope that the United States attorney would indeed challenge his decision and appeal it to create "an authoritative interpretation" of the law. The U.S. attorney adhered to Lacombe's wishes and took the matter to the Circuit Court of Appeals in 1910. The Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that Parsis are classified as white. On the same grounds, another federal court decision granted citizenship to A. K. Mozumdar. These decisions contrasted with the 1907 declaration by U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte: "...under no construction of the law can natives of British India be regarded as white persons." After the Immigration Act of 1917, Indian immigration into the U.S. decreased. Illegal entry through the Mexican border became the way of entering the country for Punjabi immigrants. California's Imperial Valley had a large population of Punjabis who assisted these immigrants and provided support. Immigrants were able to blend in with this relatively homogeneous population. The Ghadar Party, a group in California that campaigned for Indian independence, facilitated illegal crossing of the Mexican border, using funds from this migration "as a means to bolster the party's finances". The Ghadar Party charged different prices for entering the U.S. depending on whether Punjabi immigrants were willing to shave off their beard and cut their hair. It is estimated that between 1920 and 1935, about 1,800 to 2,000 Indian immigrants entered the U.S. illegally.
By 1920, the population of Americans of Indian descent was approximately 6,400. In 1923, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that Indians were ineligible for citizenship because they were not "free white persons". The court also argued that the "great body of our people" would reject assimilation with Indians. Furthermore, the court ruled that based on popular understanding of race, the term "white person" referred to people of northern or western European ancestry rather than "Caucasians" in the most technical sense. Over fifty Indians had their citizenship revoked after this decision, but Sakharam Ganesh Pandit fought against denaturalization. He was a lawyer and married to a white American, and he regained his citizenship in 1927. However, no other naturalization was permitted after the ruling, which led to about 3,000 Indians leaving the U.S. between 1920 and 1940. Many other Indians had no means of returning to India.
In 1927, Sri Lankan lecturer Chandra Dharma Sena Gooneratne, then frequently erroneously referred to as Indian, delivered several lectures across the country pertaining chiefly to indology—often advocating for Indian independence within them. While in the South, though initially facing racism, effectively circumvented any such discrimination via wearing a turban.
Indians started moving up the social ladder by getting higher education. For example, in 1910, Dhan Gopal Mukerji went to UC Berkeley when he was 20 years old. He was an author of many children's books and won the Newbery Medal in 1928 for his book Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon. However, he committed suicide at the age of 46 while he was suffering from depression. Another student, Yellapragada Subbarow, moved to the U.S. in 1922. He became a biochemist at Harvard University, and he "discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in cells, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer." However, being a foreigner, he was refused tenure at Harvard. Gobind Behari Lal, who went to the University of California, Berkeley in 1912, became the science editor of the San Francisco Examiner and was the first Indian American to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.
After World War II, U.S. policy re-opened the door to Indian immigration, although slowly at first. The Luce–Celler Act of 1946 permitted a quota of 100 Indians per year to immigrate to the U.S. It also allowed Indian immigrants to naturalize and become citizens of the U.S., effectively reversing the Supreme Court's 1923 ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. The Naturalization Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, repealed the Barred Zone Act of 1917, but limited immigration from the former Barred Zone to a total of 2,000 per year. In 1910, 95% of all Indian Americans lived on the western coast of the United States. In 1920, that proportion decreased to 75%; by 1940, it was 65%, as more Indian Americans moved to the East Coast. In that year, Indian Americans were registered residents in 43 states. The majority of Indian Americans on the west coast were in rural areas, but on the east coast they became residents of urban areas. In the 1940s, the prices of the land increased, and the Bracero Program brought thousands of Mexican guest workers to work on farms, which helped shift second-generation Indian American farmers into "commercial, nonagricultural occupations, from running small shops and grocery stores, to operating taxi services and becoming engineers". In Stockton and Sacramento, a new group of Indian immigrants from the state of Gujarat opened several small hotels. In 1955, 14 of 21 hotels enterprises in San Francisco were operated by Gujarati Hindus. By the 1980s, Indians owned around 15,000 motels, about 28% of all hotels and motels in the U.S.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European groups, which would significantly alter the demographic mix in the U.S. Not all Indian Americans came directly from India; some moved to the U.S. via Indian communities in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, the former British colonies of East Africa,, the Asia-Pacific region, and the Caribbean. From 1965 until the mid-1990s, long-term immigration from India averaged about 40,000 people per year. From 1995 onward, the flow of Indian immigration increased significantly, reaching a high of about 90,000 immigrants in the year 2000.