South Asian Immigration to the US: From Collective Farms to High-Tech Cities Through H-1B Visas

Abstract

With origins in the conscripted labor system of nineteenth century European colonies, the South Asian diaspora began in the early twentieth. Migrants faced racial hostility, their foreignness identifiable by skin color, physiognomy, languages unintelligible to Anglophone ears, and customs and religions that confirmed them as heathens in a Christian country. More threatening was their capacity for hard work at substandard wages. Driven out of the Pacific Northwest by mob violence, Sikhs from Punjab brought the intensive farming practices of their native Indus Valley to the agricultural districts of California. Prohibited by statute from owning land, they formed farming collectives to pool their modest plots and capital into larger acreages that were competitive with the industrial farms of the Central and Imperial Valleys. Prejudice and economic competition drove laws and policies that prohibited Asian naturalization (Barred Zone Act, 1917). In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act set quotas that barred migration from India. Unable to establish second generations, by the 1940s Sikh agricultural settlements were threatened with extinction. Anti-Asian policies unwound in the last half of the twentieth century. Prohibitions against Asian immigration were lifted in 1965. Preferred were those trained in science, technology, and medicine. In 1990 the H-1B visa system added workers in the nascent fields of information technology and computer science, fields where the Indian educational system was robust. After a half-century of immigration policies that favored the highly schooled in science and technology, South Asian communities were created that were intellectually, financially, and socially accomplished, transforming American society.