Why Indians May Lose Minority Jobs And Contracts If Trump Wins

Trump’s running mate JD Vance wants to end diversity programs. Trump's extremist supporters attack Usha Vance's immigrant background.

July 19, 2024

In June, United States Senator J.D. Vance, along with fellow Republican lawmakers, introduced a bill to eliminate all federal diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) “programs and funding for federal agencies, contractors which receive federal funding, organizations which receive federal grants, and educational accreditation agencies.”

Earlier in May, Vance, along with two fellow Republican Senators, wrote a letter to officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) criticizing President Joe Biden’s Administration for “not faithfully carrying out its legal duties to protect American workers from employment practices that privilege asylum seekers, parolees, and other aliens over American citizens.” 

This week, prospects improved sharply for the DEI and employment policy changes sought by Vance, which apparently also reflect Trump’s views, after Trump, 78, chose Vance, 39, as his vice-presidential running mate.

If Trump is re-elected President in November, his administration will likely end DEI – also known as minority - jobs and contracts in the government, pressure private employers and educational institutions to end their DEI programs and seek to restrict employment of non-U.S. citizens. This may lead to loss of jobs for Indian Americans and Indians on working visas in the U.S., as well as loss of business income of Indian Americans, who benefit from minority programs - for which they should not qualify, in the first place.

In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that admissions based on race at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.

This decision was welcomed by some Indian Americans. They find the minority quotas in college admissions “hypocritical in a country which values meritocracy above all else,” according to TheQUINT. Also, some of them believe that Indian Americans have achieved a “breathtaking amount” in the U.S. in a couple of generations, while “No ethnic or racial favors have come their way from schools, colleges or government.”

Yes, the managerial, technical, professional, business, and other accomplishments of Indians in the U.S. are remarkable. This largely reflects the fact that most of them - or their parents for those born in the U.S. - are immigrants who were among the top 1% of India’s educated talent.

More important, it needs to be acknowledged that, for nearly 50 years, some Indians have ignored meritocracy to secure jobs and business contracts originally set aside for economically and socially disadvantaged minorities.

In 1976, the Association of Indians in America (AIA) successfully lobbied that Indians be included as a minority in the Asian and Pacific Islander category, David Bernstein points out in his book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America. Indians, the AIA argued, “are equally dark-skinned as other nonwhite individuals” and the only label for Indians “is Asian by virtue of geographic origin.”

The term minority in this context is not a statistical measure. In 1965, in a Harvard Commencement speech, President Lyndon B. Johnson described what the minority quotas he initiated had hoped to achieve: “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.”

So, initially the minority criterion applied to African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian Pacific Islanders, and descendants of Chinese immigrants who built the railroads in the U.S. in the 19th century.

Data from the 2020 U.S. Census confirms that Indians do not suffer any social or economic disadvantages which would enable them to qualify for minority jobs and contracts. In fact, Indians enjoy several major advantages: four out of five have a college degree; have the highest per capita income of any ethnic community; hold a sizeable number of jobs in technology and on Wall Street; and about six per cent of the nearly one million 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.

Today, U.S. employers, from financial firms, large corporations, technology companies, consultancies and small businesses to universities, hospitals, government agencies and others, point to Indians on their staff as proof of their commitment towards meeting diversity goals, including for senior management and director positions.

In the case of minority business contracts, studies - such as one done for the Ohio Department of Transportation - show Indians get a disproportionate share, relative to their population size.

(Photo of J.D. and Usha Vance posted on X by Indian businessman Anand Mahindra)

During the 2016 presidential elections, J.D. Vance was a “never Trump” Republican calling Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office. ABC News reported that “Vance, whose wife, lawyer Usha Chilukuri Vance, is Indian American and the mother of their three children, also criticized Trump’s racist rhetoric, saying he could be ‘America’s Hitler.’”

J.D. Vance, a Christian, and Usha Chilukuri, a Hindu, met while studying at Yale Law School, 2010-13. They married in 2014 in Kentucky, separately holding a Hindu ceremony. In 2019, J.D. Vance converted to the Catholic faith, which decision was supported by Usha Vance. “…(F)rom the beginning, she supported my decision,” J.D. Vance wrote in his essay on conversion to Catholicism, according to the National Catholic Register.

This week Usha Vance, 38, resigned her job as associate at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. Earlier, she clerked for John G. Roberts Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh, who are both Republican appointed judges on the Supreme Court. She also attended Yale as an undergraduate and received a Masters’ degree in history from the University of Cambridge.

Usha Vance grew up in San Diego, California. Her father Krish Chilukuri is a lecturer in aeronautics engineering at San Diego State University, while her mother Lakshmi Chilukuri is a professor in biology and a college provost at the University of California, San Diego. The university profiles of Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri do not list details of their early careers, if and where they earned their PhDs, and their other education. Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri immigrated to the U.S. from Andhra Pradesh, India.

In 2022, Vance switched to becoming a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump and his policies. That year, he apologized to Trump for his earlier criticisms and won a senate seat from Ohio due to Trump’s backing.  

This week, at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, Usha Vance introduced her husband J.D. Vance before his speech accepting the nomination to be Trump’s running mate. Usha Vance’s speech, posted on YouTube, has gotten more than 500,000 views. It has attracted more than 1,600 comments, mostly favorable. One of those commenting, for instance, stated: “Usha seems just as sweet and genuine as I am feeling about JD. I pray the Lord blesses them.”

But after Vance’s nomination this week, “extremist supporters of Trump had already trained their attacks on Vance’s wife, Usha, over her Indian heritage, denigrating the couple, their mixed-race family and Usha Vance’s immigrant background,” The Washington Post reported.

J.D. Vance “has an Indian wife and a kid named Vivek. All his kids have Indian names—so it’s like, what exactly are we getting here?,” Nick Fuentes, a right-wing influencer said in a podcast. “White people are being systematically replaced in America and in Europe through immigration and — to a much-lesser extent — due to intermarrying.” The podcast has gotten more than 2.8 million views on X.

In a livestream broadcast on Rumble, Fuentes said “As a real conservative, as a real right-wing American” he is not leaving his house to vote for Trump. “Vote for what? For JD Vance and Usha.” Fuentes is a White Supremacist who met with Trump at his home in Florida in November 2022, The Post reported.

In fiscal year 2022, $22 billion in contracts were awarded to minority businesses under a Small Business Administration program. That year, U.S. agencies awarded a total of $70 billion, or more than a tenth of all federal government contracts, “to small business concerns owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.”

In addition to 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, annually award billions of dollars in business contracts to minority owned small firms.

“The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division. It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society,” Vance and the Republican lawmakers said in a statement about their bill.

In their letter to the DOJ, Vance and the Republican Senators stated that under the Trump administration (2017-2020), the DOJ launched a “Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative” which “yielded dozens of investigations, numerous settlements, and millions of dollars of compensation for American workers.” 

In his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance credited part of his success to his wife Usha Vance. “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion—I can be defused, but only with skill and precision,” Vance wrote. “It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me.”