Kamala Harris’ Indian Roots Highlight Historic Change in United States

That was in 1958, seven years before a new law transformed the American immigration system and fundamentally changed the face of the nation.

Harris is the daughter of immigrants – his mother from India and his father from Jamaica. His appointment as vice president marks a milestone and highlights a major demographic shift in the United States in recent decades as more and more immigrants have started arriving from non-European countries.

“It is extremely important. (…) First of all, it is really to affirm and anchor in our consciousness that these demographic changes are really part of our country and that they are here to stay,” said the senator from the state of Virginia, Ghazala Hashmi, who was born in India.

“His background, his experience, his leadership are an indication of how so many immigrant communities are truly woven into the fabric of this country.

Some Native Americans say the timing is a particularly telling sign of how far the community has come in the past few decades. Others note that Harris’s Indian heritage is only part of his story and cautions against painting a group that is culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse with too broad a brush.

But there is no doubt that this is a “first” that attracts attention.

“It’s quite remarkable that you have a population that numbered in the thousands 50 years ago now on a major presidential ticket,” says Pawan Dhingra, professor of American studies at Amherst College.

Dhingra says it reveals a lot about how US immigration policies have influenced who can come to the US in the first place, and what happens to generations of families once they’re here.

The United States has started admitting more Asians and Africans

“This shows how the US immigration law privileged certain types of immigrants, namely those with a high level of education and skills in scientific fields, by which many Indians, including Kamala’s mother Harris, emigrated, ”says Dhingra. “Once you have a population in the United States that is highly educated and highly skilled, then that prepares their children for certain types of achievements and opportunities that may occur in a generation or two.”

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated national origin quotas, paved the way for millions of Indians and other non-European immigrants to come to the United States.

“It fundamentally changed the demographics of the country. It made the country … more Asian and African,” Dhingra says, “although it was not her intention.”

By the 1940s and 1950s, the number of Indian immigrants to the United States had dropped so much that they did not even register in official census counts, says Devesh Kapur, director of Asia programs and professor of southern studies. -Asians at Johns Hopkins. School of Advanced International Studies.

In 1960, two years after Harris’s mother arrived in California to begin her doctoral studies, there were approximately 12,000 Indian immigrants to the United States. In 2018, according to the latest available census estimates, there were nearly 2.7 million.

“Every decade since 1980, it has almost doubled,” Kapur says.

Several waves of immigration after 1965 shaped the Native American population, say Kapur and his co-authors in their 2016 book, “The Other One Percent.” The first wave consisted of highly educated immigrants, many of whom, like Harris’ mother, came to the United States to study and pursue higher education. Then, a large cohort of families emigrated to join relatives already in the United States. Then came a generation of computer workers with visas under the H-1B program for skilled occupations. Now, according to the Migration Policy Institute, Indian immigrants are the second largest group of immigrants to the United States. Harris credits his mother, who died in 2009, as one of the most important influences in his life. She spoke of her mother’s education in India in a home “where political activism and civil leadership came naturally”, and described her childhood memories while visiting her grandfather in the city of Chennai. , in southern India. “My mother instilled in my sister Maya and I the values ​​that would shape the course of our lives,” Harris said as he accepted the Democratic Party vice-presidential nomination Wednesday night. “She raised us to be proud black women. and strong, and she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage. ” Harris bristled with questions that prompt her to claim one piece of her heritage over another.

When asked last year how she defined herself, given her Indian roots, Harris replied, “Proud American.”

“The more we care about her Native American heritage, what I hope people will take away from it is the fact that she is biracial, that she is multiracial. This is something we really have to recognize, ”Dhingra says. “Today a lot more people are multiracial or at least identify with that. … What is fascinating is that besides that, it contributes to the emergence of this new standard in America. ” How Indian Americans Vote Harris’ nomination comes as more attention is paid to the behavior of Asian Americans at the polls. “Asian Americans are now the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the United States, both as a population and as an electorate,” says Neil Ruiz, associate director of migration Global and Demographics at the Pew Research Center.

Will having Harris on the ticket influence the vote of American Indians?

It’s hard to say, says Kapur, who says he plans to conduct a survey of Indo-American voters to get a better idea of ​​what they think about Harris’ candidacy and other election matters.

“We don’t know. … There are so many factors. People are already so polarized in this election. (…) We know that in this election a much larger part of the electorate has already made up his mind, ”Kapur said.

Indian Americans were the most likely to be Democrats of any Asian-origin group polled in the 2018 AAPI Data survey, with 50% identifying themselves as Democrats and 18% as Republicans.

But some Indian Americans backed Trump in 2016. And several prominent American Indian politicians are Republicans, including former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal.

Whatever happens at the polls, seeing Harris on the ticket is likely to inspire a new generation to consider careers in politics, says Sanjay Puri, chairman of the US-India Political Action Committee. Already, he says, a growing number of Indian Americans are running for office.

“It will open the floodgates. … It will be a pivotal moment. You may see this, in 10 years, in 20 years, where there will be young people, people who will enter more and more public life in because of this, ”he said.

“Not just Americans of Indian descent, but I think opportunities are there for people everywhere… no matter how their name is pronounced, or whatever their background. I think it’s a great story. inspiring. “

‘An American name’

Harris’ first name, Kamala, comes from the Sanskrit word meaning “lotus flower”.

Johns Hopkins’ Kapur says it wasn’t a detail he focused on when the Biden campaign announced it would be on the ticket.

“For me,” he said, “what matters are the broader attributes of that individual, rather than the Indian part.” But he says his daughter, who just graduated from college, had a different reaction: “It’s good to have someone with a name that plays for me, that I recognize.”

“It’s symbolism, yes,” Kapur says. “But the symbolism should not be taken as unimportant.”

Hashmi, the Virginia state senator who toppled a sitting Republican last year, knows how important names can be. She was four years old when she immigrated to the United States from India in 1969, growing up in a small town in Georgia where, for years, she was the only South Asian family in the city.

The slogan she used in her 2019 campaign: “Ghazala Hashmi is an American name.”

Part of it was an effort to reach out to voters with an immigrant background who were not used to seeing themselves represented in political leadership. But Hashmi says the line also had a wider appeal.

“People, no matter where they came from, who they were or their demographics, it seemed like a message they really understood,” she says. “America was changing. America’s face was changing. … I could just see the impact on people’s faces. It became a message that really resonated.”

At the campaign trial, she said, moms would tell her their little daughters had changed the slogan, replacing their name with hers.

Joshua Berlinger, Vedika Sud and Fredreka Schouten of CNN contributed to this report.

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