Most Indians in the US come from upper castes and are used to being treated as royalty. Many of them came here relatively wealthy and work high wage jobs while also living in fairly insular communities. Many of them are used to a world with levels and are ok with it, at least on some level, as long as they're on top.
I think a lot of them would be absolutely shocked if they had to spend a month living in a truly rural area in the US.
They actually do caste discrimination in the US, in fact some wealthy high caste Indian Americans are VERY angry that low caste South Asian immigrants are now pushing for caste discrimination action in places like California.
There have been some newspaper articles about this in the last 2 years, I believe.
Indian on Indian discrimination is the only blatant discriminatory behavior I’ve seen (and reported to HR) in my entire career. It was amazing how someone who is a hard worker and has been great to me flipped the second they got signals that the other person was from the wrong group.
I worked for very large corporations. I've seen whole teams become Indian - it's natural. Forever whites hired only whites, men hired only men. Then we became cognizant that leaving out talented people due to bigotry was stupid. We made sure to bring in diversity , which is a good thing.
So it's been kind of weird watching an immigrant population throw diversity away and hire only Indians. Pretty soon I was the only white person left. 3 levels up all Indian.
Before attacking me, I'm from an immigrant family and I believe in immigration. But I'm not going to hide an ugly truth.
This has been a common pattern in US immigration for at least 150 years. Someone gets their foot in the door and hires a lot of their buddies from back home.
With Indians, there's the additional dynamic that's often missed from outsiders is that they are biased mainly to Indians from the same regions and castes within that region vs Indians in general.
To give an idea of a similar dynamic, I have a buddy who sold a townhouse about 5 years ago. In the ~5 years he lived there (original owner), his entire row of ~10 houses went from 1-2 Indian families to him being the last non-Indian in the row as houses turned over. When he sold due to life circumstances changing, he had 10+ offers, all appeared to be Indian, and it went well over asking (around $100k over). He found out at closing that not only were all the other owners in that row Indian, they were all originally from the same village in India. To put it in perspective, that county is 23% Asian and about 5% Indian.
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u/bolt_in_blue 5d ago
Most Indians in the US come from upper castes and are used to being treated as royalty. Many of them came here relatively wealthy and work high wage jobs while also living in fairly insular communities. Many of them are used to a world with levels and are ok with it, at least on some level, as long as they're on top.
I think a lot of them would be absolutely shocked if they had to spend a month living in a truly rural area in the US.