NRIs in US, wake up and smell the curry!

NEW YORK: Highly educated and rich, non-resident Indians in the US are waking up to their clout — and also their flaws. When Indian Americans donate millions at the presidential hopefuls’ fund-raising events, they also think about the returns on their ‘investment’. Do they have adequate influence in the American establishment in line with their contributions?

The US has around three million Indian Americans and four in every five of them have a college degree. They are also very rich. One in 20 Indian Americans is a doctor. Two out of three Indian Americans work as managers, professionals or highly paid technicians. Indian Americans are big players in establishing, running and expanding the IT sector.

They own about a third of all motels in the US. They also own a healthy percentage of smaller banks, gas stations and other businesses. Almost half the Indian American women have jobs outside their homes.

Overall, 25% of Indian American families earn 25% more than the average American household. Despite living for almost half a century in the US, they are strongly attached to India. Look at the role they played in getting the India-US N-deal. Look at the $23 billion remittances to India in a year. Consider their support for Indian charities and visiting Indian showbiz stars and gurus.

Surprisingly, only two out of every five Indian Americans have taken up US citizenship. This still means 1.2 million votes no presidential candidate can overlook. What if these Indian Americans were united as a vote bank?

Despite large populations of Indian Americans in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Florida and Illinois, they have little clout at the federal, state or local levels. When they are regularly ‘profiled’ at airports for dehumanising security searches, there are no protests from them to pressurise the Homeland Security personnel to treat them better.

Now that India is surging ahead, they will have less burden of supporting their families back home and the new generation may not have the strong emotional bonding with India, so the Indian Americans have to look ahead for their future in the US.

Vikram Bajwa sums it up, “Let us join together to do what is good for Indo-Americans, enough has been done to promote India-US policies. We have spent millions to promote policy, what did we get in return? We need to emphasise our interests in the US in 2008, an election year.”