America Should Welcome Indian Immigrants — the Persecuted Christians and Dalits, Not the Brahmins Who Oppress Them

The first ugly split in the MAGA coalition that returned Donald Trump to the White House has occurred over immigration.

But it hasn’t taken the shape of battles in the past, where big-city Democrats and cheap-labor Republicans colluded to weaponize the rhetoric of Christian compassion in order to exploit vulnerable migrants and displace Americans. Instead, what we’re seeing is something strange and a little foreign: the intrusion of haughty, aristocratic Brahmin contempt for the less fortunate, bizarrely emerging among the ranks of Donald Trump’s close allies.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s now infamous tweet on the question of expanding H1B visas contains this toxin in almost molar purity:

That seems a strange line for one of Trump’s closest allies to take, considering that Trump’s political base is working-class Americans of every ethnic heritage, many of them quite passionate about the national abuse to which the Biden administration subjected America. We currently have the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in America’s history — higher than at the height of the Ellis Island influx. This at a time when manufacturing jobs have been outsourced and working-class wages remained mostly flat for decades (except for a surge during Trump’s first term in office).

Americans are sick of constant “diversity” lectures and the nonstop demonization of their families and their ancestors, along with the unfair DEI mandates pervading industry, academia, and government, which encourage racial division. Now, instead of leftists lecturing J.D. Vance’s Rust Belt neighbors about their incurably “racist” attitudes, we have something even uglier: a son of privileged Brahmin immigrants scolding Americans about their “culture” of laziness, which is so pervasive that the U.S. must import large numbers of educated immigrants from countries like India.

250 Million Slaves in India Today

Most Americans know little about India. They think of spicy food, colorful festivals, ornate temples, and the kind, helpful people they might meet working in some convenience store. The truth is much uglier and more complicated. India is in many ways like the antebellum South, with Brahmins in the role of slaveowners and 250 million Dalits (once called “Untouchables”) born into squalor and servitude. As Jules Gomes (himself of Brahmin background) wrote here at The Stream:

Westerners need to understand that the caste system is intrinsic to Hinduism and is rooted in the legal texts of the Manusmṛti, traditionally the most authoritative of the books of the Hindu code (Dharma-shastra).

This canonical corpus, attributed to Manu — the legendary first man and lawgiver — describes the untouchable as “polluted” and “unclean” from birth. … The Dalit (untouchable) … is a different species, like an animal or sub-human. “Metaphorically and literally, the Dalit has been a ‘s–t bearer’ for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy,” writes Prof. Sagarika Ghose.

Members of higher castes shun any contact with Dalits. They exclude them from education and any but the most menial, degrading jobs. Dalits often inherit crushing debt and are forced to work that off as virtual slaves on plantations. Dalits cannot enter temples, drink from public wells, or live in most neighborhoods — often ending up segregated in squalid ghettos outside of town. They are frequently subject to violence, including rape, with little recourse to justice.

Don’t Mention the Dalits or Burning Churches

And Hindu theology justifies this systemic oppression as the just punishment Dalits are suffering for their sins in previous lives — while the privileges of the Brahmins are their reward for past-life virtues.

When tech bros like Vivek Ramaswamy talk about India’s healthy, entrepreneurial culture, they don’t mention any of that. Nor do they talk about the hundreds of churches that have been burned or the thousands of Christians persecuted by the current Hindu nationalist government of India, as The Stream has documented:

Open Doors categorizes the persecution of Christians alongside “Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan — and worse than Saudi Arabia or China.”

The signatories highlight the anti-Christian violence in the state of Manipur, which has displaced more than 65,000 believers and seen more than 400 churches bulldozed or burned down “with the sanction of the Indian state.”

Moreover, more than 2,500 Christians were forcibly displaced as Hindu mobs attacked, looted, and destroyed homes between December 2022 and February 2023 because residents refused to convert to Hinduism, the letter states.

“Local village councils even prohibit Christians from practicing their faith in their own homes,” the signatories lament, as believers are denied basic rights, including access to water and a Christian burial.

Thousands of Christians have been arrested under “anti-conversion” laws which now are enforced in 12 of the 28 states of the Indian union. Many people remain incarcerated without trial, the letter notes, citing the Evangelical Fellowship of India figures of 648 Christians arrested under these laws, with 440 arrests occurring in just one state.

The Tech Brahmins Want Endentured Servants

The Tech Brahmins don’t intend to import and hire such persecuted Christians. Nor will they bring in Dalits, since they refuse to breathe the same air for fear of ritual pollution. Instead, H1B visas extended to India simply bring in more upper-caste aristocrats, whom companies exploit because such migrants are literally indentured to work for the company that imports them. If they quit, they are shipped straight home.

What American can or wants to compete with workers like this? How many Trump voters welcome lectures on pulling oneself up by their bootstraps from billionaires born into privilege, at the top of a pyramid of injustice that goes back thousands of years?

In the buildup to our Civil War, proslavery writer George Fitzhugh published the book Cannibals All!, in which he argued that slavery was a more benevolent, efficient, and productive system than free labor in the North, and urged the northern states to simply enslave the working class so that region could benefit, too. It’s painful to realize that Vivek Ramaswamy and his allies are delivering a similar message today. More than exploitable workers (of the right social caste), they trying to import a cruel, pagan worldview which blames the victim for the oppression he endures.

America should accept new immigrants from India — in accordance with our historic values of welcoming the oppressed. That means that any and all newcomers from India should be exclusively from the groups now suffering under its government: hunted Christians and spat-upon Dalits.

Something tells me Vivek won’t climb on the juggernaut for that.