How many Indians make for “too many Indians” in the United States ? One more than all the others in the room? Or even just one more than the only other Indian in the room?

Many years ago, a housemate selection interview in a campus town in America snowballed into a legal squabble and even a distress sale of the house over a question like this. A graduate student who had rented there for a long time insisted that his Indian housemate could not get any more Indian tenants lest the Whites be overrun, as he rather explicitly insisted, not realising it was against the law to do so.

Now, questions like this are discussed by otherwise seemingly nice American people in places like Texas, where years of online campaigns and complaints about Indians “stealing jobs”, shopping in shops, winning spelling bees, and cheering in football games, have become the face of what was once optimistically called “Making America Great Again”.

The 2026 US midterm elections may be unfolding around several major issues not unfamiliar…