India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

[Mort Walker]

CKD and semi knocked down also have tariff and I think they get some relief if there's some percentage of local sourcing.

Mahindra does a lot of CKD at their factory in Michigan, but they’ve priced it in already for some vehicles.

[saip]

CKD and semi knocked down also have tariff and I think they get some relief if there's some percentage of local sourcing.

Yea I think CKD used to pay 10% duty. That seems to have been hiked to 15% now. CBU (completely build units) used to pay 75% (over 800cc) or 60% (under). Now it is cut to 60 & 50. I heard CBU bikes from Thailand attract no duty.

[panduranghari]

If reports are to be believed, Qualcomm et al semiconductor manufacturers are for sale, why is GOI not buying into this? Yes the valuations are insane, but considering we have no semi conductor industry of our own, just getting the technology is worth the price. Better than paying money for Rafale or other military goodies. Its a long game.

Use creative accounting if the numbers have to look good to justify such strategic investments. US government most likely may not object. Just like what the Chinese do.

[pravula]

Qualcomm does not have a fab. Broadcomm bid is under national security review.

[panduranghari]

Thanks. If you were in a position to make strategic decisions for India, what would you do and how would you do it?

[Bart S]

Thanks. If you were in a position to make strategic decisions for India, what would you do and how would you do it?

Rather OT for this thread, but:


Qualcomm is too expensive. Pick up niche companies and ones that are affordable.

Pick up smaller niche companies like Mellanox, Cavium or ARM (most of these are gone now). They have good chip design and DSP type capabilities.

Encourage Reliance or TCS to pick up Motorola (mobility) from Lenovo - US will gladly agree as jobs in Chicago are on the line. Storied, brand, huge market. An Indian company should have picked up HMD (the company behind the Nokia phone relaunch), still can. We were/are their biggest market. Both of these are a way around the Chinese phone/electronics invasion, and can give us excellent materials and electronics packaging expertise that is of strategic use as well.

Invest in fabs, there is no way around it and acquisitions will not help here.

[sooraj]

Intel is planning to buy Broadcom

[Supratik]

Arjun, your numbers are somewhat off. Check wiki. Most of the old Christians are Syriac or Catholic. Most of the new Christians (last 100 odd years) are Protestants. Many American churches have a hand in the conversion of new Christians and they are closely aligned to the US which may be a reason behind their higher immigration. There is no supporting data to claim that Hindus are heavily converting to Christianity in US. Mostly people are marrying out and becoming cultural Christians or unaffiliated.

[Arjun]

Supratik, I am aware of the history of Catholics / Orthodox / Protestants in India. As regards numbers, my information was very much from wiki... Catholics number 19.9 Mil out of total Christian population of 28 Million. Orthodox Christians would be at least another 2.5 Mil. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_India) This would place Catholics at close to 70% of Indian Christians.

On the other hand, if you go by this self-estimate of various Christian denominations in India, even here the ratio of Catholic + Orthodox and Protestant is something like 60:40. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian ... ominations )

If you have any links that present different numbers, do post them. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the dominant Protestant churches are in communities (like North East, tribal belt etc) that are not normally associated with US emigration. User mapunni also posted some data that conforms to the view that Catholics and Orthodox are more prominent among Christian desis in the US.

If anybody has more personal insight into the typical demographic profile of the Protestant Indian American...that will be interesting.

[Supratik]

Add the numbers. About 15 million Catholics, 4 million Syriacs and the rest Protestant. So about 55% Catholic.

[Arjun]

Ok fine...Doesn't change the fact that Catholics + Orthodox are the majority among Indian Christians, but Protestants rule in Indian American Christian circles.

I am saying good likelihood of a significant percentage being first generation converts in the US, while you are saying they are likely 2nd or 3rd gen converts from India. Somebody attending desi Protestant church in the US should be able to enlighten....

[pravula]

Thanks. If you were in a position to make strategic decisions for India, what would you do and how would you do it?

I would focus on 1 and 3 independently. 2 is strategic, not sure how we can break in.

1. Fabs - Global Foundry model
2. Insource Fab equipment - Its a cartel
3. Tweak ARM designs - Apple approach

[Ravi Karumanchiri]

Thanks. If you were in a position to make strategic decisions for India, what would you do and how would you do it?

I would focus on 1 and 3 independently. 2 is strategic, not sure how we can break in.

1. Fabs - Global Foundry model
2. Insource Fab equipment - Its a cartel
3. Tweak ARM designs - Apple approach

^^^^^
????

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicondu ... rs_by_year

Are you suggesting that there are any of these equipment makers who wouldn't ship to India?
I'm pretty sure they all would.

As for designing chips of any description in India and building them there too -- Are you suggesting this is too much math or physics for India to manage? (Or why bother acquiring a failing US business, when what you want is not even produced by them -- i.e. production technology. For that, go to the equipment makers, not their customers.)

[pravula]

This may be dated. IIRC, most of the capacity is bought out years and decades in advance and only three countries in play. Which means, you don't get #2 unless you have #1

on #3, We have a good pool of engineers (IIRC, Intel has a big dev shop in Bangalore), hence my recommendation on modifying ARM reference design. Why would you want to reinvent them?

[Ravi Karumanchiri]

^^^^^^
I'm sorry, I haven't been following the whole discussion. It just seemed to me, that if anyone is woeful that there is no chipmaking in India; why would the remedy involve buying a US company?

If the goal is to design and fab chips in India -- to get this done, don't go to the chip makers in the US -- go to the equipment makers (US and otherwise), and buy a fab. Yes, perhaps there is a lead-time when buying such things, and an order may take 24-months to fulfill for higher-end or newer (i.e. larger) equipment. But of course, there is also a secondary market of such equipment which means you can tool-up with outdated equipment and do quite well -- depending on what it is you are making.

By that I mean: If the equipment makers are always focusing on making finer equipment, capable of making things smaller and smaller, but in larger and larger numbers (think smartphones) -- It may be cost effective to buy used/refurbished equipment that is a couple-three years old. Doing so would not make a startup competitive against a big smartphone maker who is trying to build-out millions of units per year. HOWEVER it might be all the fab you'd need to produce decisive amounts of mil equipment.

If the topic of discussion is solely about the smartphone market in India, then obviously, the new venture should buy properly-scaled equipment -- likely the newest, biggest and latest (22nm-scale photolithography fab burning 450mm wafers -- 200 per hour).

If the idea is to have a flexible fab that could produce strap-on kits for PGMs, image intensifiers for NVGs and seekers and guidance for missiles of all types, just buy the gear and "Make in India".

[pravula]

Not sure where that came from. I am not recommending buying any company (US or otherwise).

[Supratik]

According to Pew survey 1-2% Hindu to Christian converts. But many are becoming cultural Christians/Western primarily through marriage.

[Neshant]

This may be dated. IIRC, most of the capacity is bought out years and decades in advance and only three countries in play. Which means, you don't get #2 unless you have #1

on #3, We have a good pool of engineers (IIRC, Intel has a big dev shop in Bangalore), hence my recommendation on modifying ARM reference design. Why would you want to reinvent them?

Royalties to ARM over time would cost a fortune.

How about adopting an open hardware architecture design like RISC-V and building on it instead of ARM.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3194357 ... -cpus.html

Whatever we do, avoid handing away India's internal semiconductor market to chinis!

Chins tried to buy Lattice but US shot down that move on national security grounds.

Practically all Chini stuff is a strategic risk.

Govt needs to push Tata-types into this space and kickstart them with a big military contact for domestically designed ICs. Strictly prohibit the lazy way out of fulfilling the contract through "import & screw driver-giri methodology" and lay down clear goals of what is to be accomplished.

[Arjun]

Almost 80% of Indian American marriages now Interracial or Interfaith

[Rudradev]

To continue with the Indian-American immigrant discussion. Here is a good piece by a Korean-American, Wesley Yang, on what the broader "Asian American" identity tag has meant and how it has evolved over time. Some of this applies to Indian-Americans as well.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... ota-system


Asian-Americans Can Blow Up America’s Racial Quota System. Will They?

By Wesley Yang

Anyone who follows coverage of racial politics in America will notice how often Asians are elided in opinion surveys, and how often they are portrayed in an incoherent and nakedly instrumental manner. Mother Jones, for instance, emblazoned the headline “Silicon Valley Firms Are Even Whiter and More Male Than You Thought” over a story disclosing that Google’s workforce was 60 percent white (less than the share of white people in the general population) and 34 percent Asian (nearly six times greater than the share of Asians in the general population). Asians aren’t seen as a “real” minority—nobody has them in mind when they speak of minorities, and thus the hiring of many Asians does not count for those in pursuit of “diversity.” This exclusion has been formalized into the bureaucratic euphemism “underrepresented minority,” which means “minorities who are not Asian.”

A lawsuit filed by a white recruiting manager at YouTube last week alleged that the company imposed unlawful quotas for hiring black, Hispanic, and female candidates while ceasing to hire white and Asian males. The quasi-monopolistic tech behemoth is now being sued for discriminating against women, men, conservatives, leftists, and white, and Asian males, even as it is also being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for failing to turn over data on its diversity numbers. Asian-American advocates took to social media to decry the use of Asian-Americans as a “wedge” against those seeking diversity, yet again adopting the oddly reflexive deference to all such pushes for “diversity” that explicitly intend to increase the number of “underrepresented minorities” at the expense of Asians. Gaze at this pattern of events long enough, and you can glimpse the vulnerability of the system of tense compromises that have structured the American racial compact since the 1990s.

There has always been something faintly ludicrous about the “Asian-American” identity. A survey conducted in 2012 by the Pew Research Institute of the attitudes of the six largest (Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean) of the more than 30 distinct nationalities collected under the umbrella of the “Asian-American” identity found that fewer than 15 percent of respondents considered themselves to be “Asian-Americans.” All races are, to varying degrees, artificial constructs. The “Asian-American” identity is an artificial construct that scarcely anyone claims.


There is no reason to expect otherwise. The term was coined by a handful of Yale College student activists of Chinese and Japanese descent in the 1960s. As immigrants from Asia began to arrive in large numbers in the 1970s, the term came to encompass successive waves of immigrants from a growing list of countries. It became a bureaucratic designation adopted by the government in 1977. No one chose it for themselves. Others applied it to them.

Such a confected identity, imposed from above by political entrepreneurs and the government, does not mean anything coherent to the vast majority of those to whom it ostensibly applies. Most of those to whom the term applies—70 percent of them—are foreign-born. The nationalities subsumed under the Asian-American rubric do not share a common language, culture, ancestry, or nationality. They share in common only two things: origins that they trace back to the world’s largest continental landmass, and a liminal place in America’s bipolar racial schema.

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 ended a system of national-origins quotas that kept America white for four decades. Fewer than a million people of Asian descent lived in America in 1960. They constituted less than one half of 1 percent of the U.S. population. They arrived by means of family-reunification policies known as chain migration. Today, 20 million people of Asian descent constitute nearly 7 percent of the U.S. population and are growing faster than any other group. The Trump administration’s push to end chain migration is a measure that will above all slow the ingress of Asian immigrants into America.

Pro-business conservatives of a libertarian bent have noticed that such a move would be a self-inflicted wound dealt to a country in need of fresh energy to renew its drive for innovation and excellence. Bret Stephens, in a barely tongue-in-cheek provocation calling for the deportation of native-born Americans in favor of immigrants, noted for instance that the vast majority of STEM and engineering majors are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Eighty-three percent of Intel Science Talent Search winners are immigrants, the vast majority of whom hail from Asian countries. He went on to argue that the United States is a country “that belongs first to its newcomers,” which can stand as perhaps the most concise statement of the unstated premise held by our governing classes that summoned the Trumpist insurgency to life.

The same survey that found that 85 percent of “Asian-Americans” do not think of themselves as “Asian-Americans” found that this demographic was better educated and earned a higher income than any other “racial” group in America. They had more confidence in the future and more optimism about their own prospects than did the country as a whole. Asian-Americans were the group least likely to be incarcerated and most likely to own their homes. They had the highest median household income in America.

The survey drew indignant responses from Asian-American activists and civil-rights leaders, who objected to the portrayal of their community as prosperous, striving, and confident. This will only seem comic and perplexing to those who don’t understand the system of racial patronage premised on a narrative of victimization of which the “Asian-American” political project is a part.


This was a narrative that never sat easily with the actual experience of Asian immigrants arriving after 1965. But it was always a key premise of the Asian-American movement that Asians were a racially subordinated group whose primary affiliation should be to the civil-rights movement that fought for black integration and an end to white supremacy. In a country with a white supermajority, Asians would have to ally with the best organized non-white group in America and derive its political power from association with it. “Asian-Americans” love to cite the example of Grace Lee Boggs, who admired Malcolm X and Black Power, and Richard Aoki, who hung out with the Black Panthers (though the evidence seems to suggest he may have been an FBI informant).

The activists and academics who sought to create an Asian-American identity gravitated toward Third World anti-colonial movements and were preoccupied with the white-supremacist history that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 brought to a close. It was this history that was studied and taught in Asian-American studies programs. These activists were the Japanese-American children of those interned by the U.S. government during WWII. They were the Chinese-American remnant that persisted in the United after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, growing almost entirely through illegal immigration in urban enclaves where the gender balance was heavily disproportionate: As late as 1943, the ratio of men to women living in New York City’s Chinatown was 9 to 1. They had been born into an American state whose racially conscious laws had served as a model and inspiration for the legal architects of Nazi Germany. Their politics and scholarship reflected this experience.

The central paradox of the experience of Asian-Americans arriving after 1965 is that the main white-supremacist measure taken against Asians took the form of exclusion from the country altogether. This meant that most Asian-Americans arriving after 1965 have no direct or familial experience of an overtly racist America. Chinese-Americans already had higher incomes than their white counterparts by the 1950s. The formal end of racially discriminatory laws made it possible for many children of Asian immigrants to march directly into the Ivy Leagues and then into elite investment banks, law firms, tech, and consulting firms in a single generation—a rate of assimilation into the upper echelons of American society unlike that experienced by any other group in the history of the world.

In those places, of course, many Asian-Americans experienced the racially-inflected status politics of everyday life placing a limit on their aspirations. All throughout corporate America, Asians who were often the most common employees at the junior level, were the least likely to ascend to upper management. One Asian-American female at a major consulting firm likened the role of Asian-Americans in these corporate settings to “coolies in a white-collar sweatshop.” In the New York Times Magazine, the writer Jay Caspian Kang described Asians as “the loneliest Americans,” going on to evoke a “quiet, unaddressed isolation that comes with knowing that you can be born in this country, excel in its schools and find a comfortable place in its economy and still feel no stake in the national conversation.”


Asian-American activists recently underscored the incoherence of the identity for which they claim to speak by supporting initiatives in state governments across the country calling for the disaggregation of data collection on Asian-Americans. The goal is to highlight the diversity of the nationalities constituting the Asian-American identity. The purpose is to ensure that those subgroups who lag behind the others in their educational attainment and income, such as the Cambodian, Laotians, and the Hmong (many of whom came here as refugees), do not disappear into aggregate figures that show that Asian-Americans are the best-educated, highest-income, and fastest-growing of all racial groups in America. We have poor people too! the activists insist. See? We’re not a model minority after all.

In other words, the Asian-American leadership petitioned the government to cease treating them as the single group that they are not and never were. They aggregated the group into a fictitious identity in the first place (and still purport to represent the interests of 20 million Americans of Asian descent) so as to maximize the numbers they could claim to represent on paper. They then resorted to disaggregating what they had themselves aggregated, so as to have a claim to represent disadvantaged minorities who need civil-rights leaders. All racial categories begin as incoherent fictions, but some remain so forever.

The question of whether Asian-American leaders actually represent any of the people they claim to represent has been put to the test in recent years. The answer is no: at least with respect to one of the largest Asian-American constituencies, a recent cohort of newly arrived Chinese-Americans from the mainland, who seek what the multicultural politics of racial patronage that the Asian-American coalition has embraced specifically forbids.

These new Chinese-Americans want a strictly meritocratic, race-neutral admissions schema to be imposed by the Supreme Court onto the nation’s elite colleges. They want this because it is the schema that will result in higher rates of acceptance for their children. The sharp-elbowed ethnic lobby of Chinese immigrants doesn’t care about the other parts of the multicultural coalition of which the Asian-Americans feel themselves to be a part. It’s not concerned to preserve the tense compromises around affirmative action that black and Hispanic elites have made with white elites to preserve a space for the white scions of privilege to avail themselves of legacy and donor preferences, or the preferences for the country club sports of squash and fencing in exchange for minority set-asides. They don’t want to preserve this consensus because it is this consensus that has kept the Asian-American population at Ivy League colleges frozen in place, even as the Asian-American population has exploded. They want a system in which applicants are rank ordered according to transparent, quantifiable criteria with no racial gerrymandering.

This is also the reasoning of many Indian-Americans who are moving away from the Democrats' "Rainbow Coalition" of all non-white minority groups. Much of "diversity-driven" identity politics is based on ensuring that blacks and hispanics have more opportunities at the expense of whites. Regardless of the moral arguments to be made, Indian-Americans (and other Asian-Americans) end up being left out in the cold by "diversity quotas" that mainly help blacks and hispanics.

We are now stuck between the devil (institutionalized white Christian racism, rejuvenated under Trump, which cuts down our numbers and accelerates our children's deracination by reducing immigration from India)... and the deep blue sea (supporting the Democrats' "rainbow coalition" diversity politics, which mainly benefits blacks and hispanics while undercutting the gains that Indian-Americans could achieve in a purely merit-based system).

This article shows how other Asian-American groups have also struggled with this dilemma, as below:

Wherever this has been done, as in California, which forbade racial preferences in 1996 by referendum, the share of Asian-American admissions leaps, and the share of black and Hispanic admissions plummets. (Interestingly, while the first entering freshman class of black and Hispanic students enrolled in the U.C. system was cut by more than half, the absolute number of these students who earned a degree actually increased.) And yet, the Asian-American population of California voted by a robust majority against the very measure that increased its admission rates into the U.C. system.

That was what Asian-Americans considered to be in their interest in 1996. The latest newcomers no longer do. They instead regard racial preferences as invidious and their own struggle to end them as a civil-rights battle for fair treatment—not on the basis of racial favoritism, but rather in defense of the principle of merit, which is construed narrowly to depend on quantitative measures of achievement such as grades and SATs. They are, in fact, the only racial constituency that embraces this principle, because they are the group that would benefit most from such a system.

This would mean the end of Asian-American deference not just to blacks and Hispanics who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action and other diversity initiatives that focus on “underrepresented minorities,” but also to whites who have their own coded forms of preference that prop up their own incumbency in a spoils systems that favors everyone else over the highest-achievement group. This defection of Chinese-Americans from the Asian-American coalition doesn’t just threaten the Asian-American political project. It also threatens the entire system of racial patronage, in which America is organized into four racial collectives—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, with the three non-white groups allied together to defend the interests of minorities amidst white hegemony. It presents another possibility: That in pursuing their own narrow ethnic interests, Asians can break up the coalescence of the country into racial blocs and come to occupy a key fulcrum point in the racial politics of America.

[Rudradev]

I find myself leaning against this business of purely "merit-based" criteria *for immigration* (though not for university admissions and other things).

This is because there are huge (though not immediately obvious) benefits that accrue from the presence of large numbers of Hindu Indian immigrants, ESPECIALLY if they are not professional/corporate types like most NRIs/Indian-Americans on BRF are.

Of necessity, we "meritorious" types MUST be integrated, MUST assimilate with our white neighbours and co-workers, in order to find everyday social acceptance or advancement in our careers. Good for us, but what of our kids? If they grow up in our colour-blind, assimilated version of the American Dream, go to mostly-white "good schools" for K-12, and then on to desirable university campuses permeated with a liberal (and Western universalist) culture... deracination is a fait accompli. They don't even have to convert or marry outside the community for this to happen. The overwhelming currents of a society founded on a purely "merit-based" immigration system for Indian-Americans will invariably lead them there.

What do our children have to look at as an ethnically grounded cultural model? What experiences shape their understanding of who they are and where they come from?

In the "little Indias" of Jackson Heights NY, Devon St (Chicago), Iselin Township NJ, and many others... most of the residents are not people who came here by "merit based" immigration. The vast majority came by chain migration. Many don't have college degrees, plenty didn't even finish school. Most still are comfortable speaking their mother tongues rather than English.

Yet this is where the temples are. This is where the streets are crowded with storefronts doing business, selling wares, speaking languages, serving food that we think of as "ours". The Chinese, even the Silicon Valley or Wall St. Chinese, have their Chinatowns to look to as cultural totems, to take their children to on weekends or festival days. It is the regular, accustomed bathing of Hindu Indian-American children in the waters of their own cultural experience that will, to whatever extent possible, immunize them against the currents of deracination that await them in the white-dominated world.

We need our little Indias, we need the cab drivers and motel owners and small businessmen and temple purohits. We "assmiliated" types must form the oil-droplet around a greater mass of resilient, culturally grounded, resolutely non-assimilating Hindus in America... a population that replenishes itself generation after generation with more immigration as their children, too, venture forth to college educations and join the ranks of the professional and corporate class.

We also need our families, and extended families, and linguistic communities (Patels, Reddys, Kammas, Saraswats, CKPs, Iyengars, Baruahs, whatever they may be) to form a close network of social interaction in addition to our nice white and other non-Indian neighbours. We need our children to have "uncles" and "aunties" in the Indian sense, not just literally siblings of their parents, and we need places and occasions where our children can interact with the children of these "uncles" and "aunties" as well. We need masses of people who will get together on festival days or arangetrams or weddings to celebrate them in our traditional ways, so that our children recognize these traditions themselves as endearing and sacred and irrevocable... not merely exoticised phenomena to be observed on TV screens or read about in textbooks.

Preserving chain migration is a must for this. A "merit" based system will cut down immigration of all these people and leave us as a sterile (though economically and academically successful) population breeding wannabe whites.

[Cosmo_R]

According to Pew survey 1-2% Hindu to Christian converts. But many are becoming cultural Christians/Western primarily through marriage.

Whatever the number, you have to ask why. People choosea faith based on clarity: personal god, one way to salvation etc. Hinduism is la carte. No book, no same hymn page, no doom for unbelievers etc.

Hindu second generation + in the US want to believe bu the temple structure is not geared to them. The priests are not connected to the flock. No networking among the flock etc. This emphasis on the past (Vedas as source of all current scientific knowledge etc.) alienates the young who look to the future.

Religion is 80% marketing.

[Rudradev]

^^Cosmo: that is precisely my point. Hinduism isn't dogmatically prescribed (from a book). It isn't ministered (by a Church). It is experienced, as a set of living traditions and narratives. That experience comes from constant, abundant, lifelong interaction with other Hindus, period. Take away the interaction, the "Hindu" is gone.

If grandmother isn't here because of "merit-based immigration" restrictions, who has the inclination (or time) to prepare rangoli? Who transmits the civilizational memory of our itihasa as bedtime stories? If you don't have a sizeable number of other Indians in your community, preferably from your own particular tradition and linguistic group, who will get together a dozen vegetarian dishes and decorate the murti for an annual Ganesh or Laxmi puja?

We don't have hymnals, we don't have smug child-molesters preying on our guilt or instructing us on the virtues of a "personal god"; these are the things we have instead. They make us who we are.

Without more Hindu Indian immigration to America, from all rungs of society and all walks of life, we will go extinct in this country.

[Cosmo_R]

^^Rudradev, " Without more Hindu Indian immigration to America, from all rungs of society and all walks of life, we will go extinct in this country."

The only alternative to extinction is evolution. We must evolve.

[Misra]

^^Cosmo: that is precisely my point. Hinduism isn't dogmatically prescribed (from a book). It isn't ministered (by a Church). It is experienced, as a set of living traditions and narratives. That experience comes from constant, abundant, lifelong interaction with other Hindus, period. Take away the interaction, the "Hindu" is gone.

the kernel, outside of india, has to be yoga—not the ‘doing yoga’ variety but the ‘being in yoga’ kind. it seems to me that as parents we have to set the example for our children by first personally making the kind of commitment that that will take

while the yearning of first/second gen indian emigrants to create a useful substitute for the vibrant culture we leave behind is understandable, imo it will be very difficult to make real given our relative numbers in most lands we have emigrated to

all hindu narratives/stories become very easy to transmit/be receptive to once a person, adult or suitably aged child, experiences yoga for what it is. of course, yoga has the added benefit of being the best medium to propagate the universal indian ideas outside india anyway. because it works, the child growing up with yoga will be automatically equipped with a) the clarity necessary to understand self (as indian-origin) and b) the tools necessary to propagate Indianness outside of india

[Arjun]

We need our little Indias, we need the cab drivers and motel owners and small businessmen and temple purohits. .

There are and will always be specialist visas for priests, chefs and other such specialized professions. Supply of desi retail stores will only depend on the demand for these stores - and demand comes from having many more and and wealthier Indian Americans.

Indian Americans form around 1% of the US population and already represent something like 10% of the elite broadly speaking (in some sectors it may be much higher). The more the concentration of merit based immigration the higher the percentage of Indian Americans among the American elite. It could at some stage start approaching the degree of Jewish penetration in the levers of American power - with concomittant benefits for India and Hindus.

At the end of the day, wealth will brings its own benefits to Hindus. We have already seen that in India and globally and we just need that pace to accelerate.

[Rudradev]

Sorry, just doesn't add up. We have "wealth" now. And we're still going extinct.

What we need is numbers, sheer numbers irrespective of the markers of so-called "merit".

Our people are hard-working and industrious, they can come to the US without degrees or corporate jobs and still become financially well-off without losing their Hindu cultural foundations. The whole "merit-based" immigration scam is geared to never give them that chance.

It's also absurd to compare ourselves to the Jews. Most Jews in America are white, and they follow a Semitic-Abrahamic religion. Two overwhelming advantages that our people will never, ever have in a white Christian (indeed, Judeo-Christian) dominated society.

[Arjun]

If we are interested in sheer numbers - we have already established that emphasis on merit based emigration is the one that will maximize this for Indians.

I differ with you on the implications to Indian Amercans of the move to merit-based immigration. Anycase, lets wait for the details of the new immigration scheme to come out, so we have something tangible to discuss.

[Rudradev]

I'm afraid you have established no such thing.

What you have provided are *relative* figures that compare the naturalization routes taken by the *present* population of Indian immigrants, as opposed to immigrants from other nationalities.

They by no means indicate that the *absolute* numbers of Indian immigrants to the US will be "maximized" by eliminating so-called "chain migration" or other routes that are supposedly not "merit based".

In fact, it is clear from the progressive deracination of Hindu Indian Americans that the current pattern of naturalization routes (i.e. the data you provided) is completely inadequate to meet the numbers required for a sustainable, culturally Hindu population of Indian origin in the US.

Every avenue that currently exists for the immigration of Hindu Indians to America needs to be kept open, widened, and indeed supplemented with new additional avenues. That is the only way we don't end up extinct.

[Arjun]

There are currently family sponsored preference, employment preference and diversity quotas in place - ie they are subject to annual limits. There are no limits for immediate family members of US citizens and for refugees. If we move towards a system whereby the immigration visas for immediate family members remains in place, refugee numbers restricted, and the overall quota based preferences to be more weighted towards employment or merit based ones - then that route would maximize the entry of Indian Americans. Do you disagree ?

[Singha]

it depends on which side of the GC fence and where one is sitting.
for the poor EB3 person waiting 15 years with no luck of the coveted current date so far.....his way is paved with a complete rollback/elimination of family based, per country and refugee numbers
for the business owner or aeging silicon valley/NJ patriarch who got in via university or work but wants to helps cousins, siblings, relatives emigrate, it is the exact opposite...in any case the wait time for direct siblings was also very long earlier.

we have two sets of people even from the same community but separated by educational and family history back home.

in the end no country can accomodate or help the number of talented and hard working people we have. we are fighting over a small slice of the problem - the "right" to thrive and grow in murica. it is a "right" granted only grudgingly and as per need by the gora ecosystem.

ultimately people will have to find their future in india -- no other nation whether gora or kala will indefinitely be able to absorb indians...right now aus and canada are giving PR to educated applicants in india with about a year of wait time ... but how long...already hordes from middle east fleeing their failed islamic ecosystems are piling up at the door and pouring through, with good political support, alleging they are more deserving fleeing persecution, war and famine....

india is not a failed state and we cannot pretend to be one. either we be a failed state and become the worlds problem to support - islamic block and africa most of it fall in that bucket , have a sense of entitlement and play victim
OR
india develop and become rich and successful

right now we are in middle...hence we get neither the victimhood benefits of being a failed state nor the advantages of being a rich one

[Singha]

the idea that 1% of the population, non-gora , but wealthy can somehow "turn" the US to be more beneficial to indian strategic interest sounds false to me. it is not always about lobbying money, the deep state does what it does, no matter how much money one throws into the donation box
the next shatterpoint in the force might come if the hispanics start taking positions of real power and splinter the deep state, taking control of some high ground. but this in my assessment is some decades away, they need to move into wall street and top univs/think tanks, marry into the old elites, gain entry into white shoe clubs and be accepted albeit grudgingly as "good old boys" .... and when that happens their goals and thought process might have no delta with the current top layer.

[Zynda]

Honestly, I would prefer if our folks could stay back here in India & contribute and get it going forward by huge steps which would have a more tangible effect on India's soft & hard power (economic, military, strategic etc.) rather than wish for US to relax immigration policy so that more Indians can settle in US or other countries. For ex: thinking small...no matter how many Indians are represented in US or any advanced country, they will never share high end gas turbine tech or any other similar strategic tech to SDREs. It is up on us to develop on our own using our own gifted folks. Of course the latter is dependent on GoI/MoS/MoD providing the right infra & tools (along with compensation) to make it happen...can't do wonders with one hand tied behind our backs. There will always be people who would want to leave India no matter how better avg. quality of life becomes...no one can stop them.

[Misra]

in the end no country can accomodate or help the number of talented and hard working people we have.
...
ultimately people will have to find their future in india
...
india develop and become rich and successful
...
right now we are in middle...

sounds about right. the urgency of the desire to increase number of indian emigrants is likely to progressively diminish—as indian hard/soft power increases in the decades to come

perhaps those of us doomed to become extinct in foreign lands should instead begin to think in terms of the quality of the legacy we leave behind...imho all roads lead to yoga

[panduranghari]

Also this is perhaps the worst time in the history of Hindus to immigrate into America.
Few pointers:
1/ The amount of money spent per student in US has fallen 25% in the last 5 years. The tragectory is downward.
2/Pension costs contribute towards 15% of state expenses, compared to 7% 5 years back.
3/Crime in cities within the US is up 38% over the last 5 years
4/ US as a whole spends 11% more on entitlements than on infrastructure. This is predicted to rise over the next 10. 2025 is claimed to be the watershed year when all tax receipts will cover just social security i.e. Public Pensions+Medicare+Medicaid. There wont be ANY funds for defence or policing or infrastructure any everything else where government spends money.
5/ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opin ... ml?mcubz=0 - quote - “For all their many problems, our cities are our greatest economic drivers. Their continued revival is critical to the country’s ability to innovate and compete, create jobs and raise incomes and living standards. For all the nostalgia about the seamy old days of Times Square, we should not look forward to going back to the urban economic and social dysfunction of the 1970s and ’80s. Sopping or reversing the urban revival would not just be bad for cities. It would be a disaster for all of us.”


I do not see why productive Hindus should migrate to the US? Chain migration might be the chain holding those hopeful returners back. Hindus in the US must arm themselves and get firearms training. Many parts will be almost dystopic.

[Supratik]

Singha, according to current trends Indian population can end anywhere between 1.6 billion to 2 billion. You will need a parking space for millions nationalistic grandstanding notwithstanding.


Rudradev, you are living in a utopian world. In America inter-mixing is inevitable. It is better to bring different people together under dharma rather than trying to transfer a mini-India into US for security.

[Viv S]

Singha, according to current trends Indian population can end anywhere between 1.6 billion to 2 billion. You will need a parking space for millions nationalistic grandstanding notwithstanding.

The population density issue is a little exaggerated. Its an issue yes - but one that can be easily tackled by a govt that takes the urban development seriously. Case-in-point: Taiwan, South Korea, coastal China, Netherlands.

Emigration is not an answer - the current Indian-American population (developed over decades) is about 0.2% of India's population. That's not even enough to cover annual incremental growth.

[Singha]

>> You will need a parking space for millions

by all means move around and find parking space if you can , none have stopped you?, just saying the best parking garages have no particular reason to favour 1.5 billion indians vs 1.5 billion africans vs 1 billion mussalmans from all over. and infact population is a curse on their well funded cradle to brave benefit systems....they would much cheaper invest in more automation and even home robots than import the curry and rice eating yindu who wants to bring a stream of migrants in once the gate is opened. what is the 'respect' given now to the 'esteemed highly specialized IT professionals' imported when needed by the H1b stream ? we can see it loud and clear... everyone will use what they need on a use and throw basis.... record number of rejections and RFEs even for the 3 year extention which was a formality earlier.

US based NRIs hog most of the limelight, but we should remember they are only small part of it .... most diaspora is around the IOR rim, many retaining indian citizenship and much closer ties home .... neither is there a large society there to intermarry into

https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/201 ... -they-are/

[Singha]

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/the-sec ... -topscroll

australia is mulling cutting half the number of parking spots .... and this a continent masquerading as a country, with minerals oozing out from under every rock, but its 5 or so top cities continue to have very high living expenses.

[Singha]

In the past lakhs of farmers moved to west indies, fiji, mauritius

I await the day when usa, canada, russia, kazakhstan, brazil, argentina with vast farm suited land will let 100 mil surplus landless our farmers emigrate and abandon their machinery mode