Why Hiring Indians For Minority Jobs In The U.S. May Be Challenged
Harvard University. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
June 29, 2023
Some Indians have opposed admission quotas for Blacks and other minorities at the top colleges in the United States. Yet, at the same time, some Indians claim minority status to secure jobs and business contracts set aside for minorities.
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling today will likely soon lead to lawsuits that could disqualify Indians claiming such minority benefits. The court ruled that admissions based on race at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.
“Proudly wearing my ‘I love Students for Fair Admissions’ (SFFA) Badge Today! We won!” tweeted Vijay Jojo Chokalingam. He describes himself as “an ethically challenged, hard-partying Indian American frat boy…(who) didn’t have the grades or test scores to get into medical school.” He posed as black to get into the St. Louis School of Medicine. Now he works as a college admissions consultant, career coach, and resume writer in Los Angeles.
The lawsuit against the admission policies was filed by SFFA, a non-profit lobbying group based in suburban Washington DC. It says its mission is “to support and participate in litigation” to establish that “A student’s race and ethnicity should not be factors that either harm or help that student to gain admission to a competitive university.” Conservative foundations, which oppose quotas and other benefits for minorities in all areas, make up the bulk of SFFA’s funding, according to The Harvard Crimson..
Some Indian Americans, who were not accepted by the top-ranked colleges, are among SFFA’s 20,000 members. Asian Americans, especially Indian Americans, find the minority quotas in college admissions “hypocritical in a country which values meritocracy above all else,” according to TheQUINT.
However, at the same time, some Indian Americans ignore meritocracy and implicitly claim to have suffered disadvantages, similar to Blacks, in order to secure jobs and business contracts set aside for minorities.
The term “minority” in this context is not a statistical measure. It is applied to Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other groups in the U.S. who have historically faced discrimination, owned few businesses, and held few white collar and management jobs.
In 1965, describing what minority quotas - also known as affirmative action and diversity policies - hopes to achieve, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” This is quoted by Evan Mandery in his Politico article titled, How White People Stole Affirmative Action — and Ensured Its Demise.
Up until 1976, Indians were not classified as minorities by the U.S. government. That year, the Association of Indians in America (AIA) lobbied key U.S. lawmakers and government officials to include Indians in the Asian and Pacific Islander category – now known as the Asian category, writes David Bernstein in his book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America.
Indians were entitled to minority status, AIA argued, because they “are equally dark-skinned as other nonwhite individuals.” Also, the only label for Indians “is Asian by virtue of geographic origin.”
The original intent for including Asians among minorities was to help uplift the people from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and other U.S. jurisdictions in Asia and the Pacific, descendants of nineteenth century Chinese railroad workers and Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War Two.
Data from the 2020 U.S. Census indeed confirms that Indians are not a disdvantaged minority: four out five have a college degree; they have the highest per capita income of any community; hold a sizeable number of jobs in technology and Wall Street; and about 10 per cent of doctors in America are of Indian descent.
Also, none of the four million Indians in the U.S., except for Sikh farmers who emigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century and their descendants, suffered any historical discrimination and economic hardships.
Akaash Singh
Today, U.S. employers, from financial firms, large corporations, technology companies, consultancies and small businesses to universities, hospitals, government agencies and others, proudly point to Indians on their staff as proof of their commitment towards meeting diversity goals, including for senior management and director positions.
As in the case of jobs, billions of dollars in business contracts are set aside annually for minority owned small firms by federal and state government agencies, train and road transport services, airport and port operators, educational institutions, and several private companies, especially in government regulated businesses such as phone, gas and electric utilities, construction, banks, and financial services. Studies have shown that Indian Americans get a disproportionate share of minority business contracts.
In 1976, the Indian League of America (ILA), a rival to the AIA, opposed Indians seeking minority status. The ILA noted, writes Bernstein in his book, that the racial preferences for Indians, despite their high average economic and educational status, would lead to a backlash from Whites and others. The opponents may seek a restrictive quota for Indians, a ceiling instead of a floor, for preferential admissions to educational institutions, job placements and securing government and private business contracts.
Indeed, as the ILA anticipated, conservative groups are seeking an end to diversity quotas for jobs and business contracts. “I see #SupremeCourt's #AffirmativeAction Decision as the First Step Towards Gaining True #Equality Under the Law,” one conservative activist tweeted.
Over the past two years, a lawyer representing the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research has sent letters to American Airlines, McDonald’s, Novartis and other companies “demanding that they undo hiring policies that the group says are illegal,” The New York Times reported. The Center has also sued Starbucks over its hiring policies.
It is not just conservative groups that will likely seek to end minority benefits for Indians. In 1989, Chinese American businesses persuaded the San Francisco city government to exclude Indians from a contract preference program for minorities. “The Chinese argued that the Indian Americans were recent immigrants who had no history of discrimination in the United States,” Bernstein writes. In 1991, a group of Black Elected Democrats opposed Indians being included in the minority category in Ohio state.
Also, as the ILA predicted, conservative groups will likely seek to restrict the number of Asians admitted to the top colleges. Asian Americans currently make up more than 20% of students at the top colleges, while they are only 7% of the U.S. population.
While some Indians say that the Supreme Court decision on college admissions will benefit them, at best only a handful of additional Indians and other Asians will get admission.
For this year’s incoming Class of 2027, the top colleges selected between 3.4% (Harvard) to 8% (New York University) of their applicants. The total number of applicants ranged from about 11,000 at Bowdoin College to around 57,000 at Harvard and Columbia and more than 120,000 at NYU. The total number admitted by the top colleges have stayed roughly flat for decades - around 17,000 at the Ivy League Colleges.
Given the low acceptance rates, most applicants with high academic achievements do not get admitted to a top college. In the case of Indian Americans, the odds are even lower due to competition from fellow Asians. And this competition keeps intensifying given the rapidly rising population of Asian Americans: from 3.5 million in 1980 to more than 22 million in 2019; and projected to surpass 46 million by 2060, according to the Pew Foundation.
Indians should follow the example of Ankur Gopal, founder of Interapt: “My vision has always been to create 10,000 technology jobs” in a region of Kentucky, hurt economically by the closure of coal mines. As Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat from Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives, told the Indian Express, “What’s really important is for Indian Americans to recognize that not all people in the United States have enjoyed the same level of economic success or educational attainment, and it’s really up to us to help everyone else to succeed.”
Indians in the U.S. ought to find the minority label unsettling. It is in their self-interest to establish that they were chosen for jobs and business contracts based on merit. Otherwise, their achievements will always be doubted, even as they are burdened with the minority label.
In a video, comedian Akaash Singh pokes fun of fellow Indians in the U.S. seeking to qualify as minorities While Blacks have been mistreated and oppressed for centuries, Singh says, “I wanted to send a message to anybody who looks like me: You don’t deserve anything…Your parents…did not get here because they thought everybody owes them…They came over here because they worked, they were the best of the best…how we lost that so quickly disgusts me.”
(Story updated 7.1.2023)
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