On November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president, my high school history teacher pulled me back after class.
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
Before I could answer, he expressed concern that I should be vigilant in a post-Trump world. “Don’t be surprised if people start telling you to go back to where you came from,” he said.
I’ve often thought about that moment—the unnecessary injection of racial anxiety into my otherwise normal school day—when I think about the irony of progressive identity politics. My parents, both born in India but educated in America, would laugh about their well-intentioned but misguided friends who, in their eagerness to ward off the idea of “otherness,” ended up contributing to it.
Growing up, I was quick to challenge the careless usage of terms like “racist” and “xenophobic” as lazy ways to shut down legitimate debate. Even when I was 16, before I could articulate economic arguments, discussing border security seemed fair game—not because I feared immigrants, but because a country needs to know who’s coming in. Back then, when people called MAGA supporters racist, I thought they were overreacting.
But then a few days ago, I opened X to see my feed populated with anti-Indian vitriol—calling the country where my parents were born “filthy” and its people “filthy and undesirable.” Some condemned these comments but many others agreed, and still others criticized the critics for crying racism. But I could see it for what it was: raw bigotry.
My life is filled with immigrants from India and Nigeria and Lebanon and the Dominican Republic—many of whom are definitionally the “working class”—who voted for Trump. They are family members and neighbors, cafe owners who greet me by name, doctors, cleaning ladies, the mailman, my Cape Verdean babysitter-turned-friend of many years. All of them opposed illegal immigration while defending Trump from critics: “He’s not anti-legal immigration, he’s anti-illegal immigration,” they’d said. “I’m pro-legal immigration—make it easier to do it the lawful way,” they’d say.
But now, we must all reckon with an ugly part of the MAGA agenda they did not realize existed.
While the H-1B visa is derided by critics as conferring a mere “guest worker” status, for many young people I know, the visa represents their golden ticket to join a country they deeply believe in. I personally know dozens of people on F-1 student visas and H-1Bs: former college classmates from Colombia, Denmark, Pakistan, China, and India, now working 60-hour weeks in tech and finance. I watch as those on F-1s anxiously play the H-1B lottery, and pray of winning. These friends are Eagles fans and Mets fans, they argue over American politics, they road-trip across the Rocky Mountains, and they’re among the most patriotic people I know. The most passionate defender of American justice I’ve ever met is my friend Meera, 25, who grew up in Singapore after her parents left Pakistan. After spending a year working on a visa, she enrolled in law school, driven by the dream of becoming a judge. She speaks about American law and our presumption of innocence the way others describe a beautiful painting.
Immigrants and foreigners also serve as America’s sharpest cultural critics, because they have experienced a frightening alternative: countries ravaged by bureaucracy, communism, poverty, and sectarian violence. They see the patterns. They know what’s at stake.
But when concerns about visas turn into comments about the replacement of “American” people, immigrants know that our culture has crossed a bright line. This shift confirms what liberals have long suspected and my history teacher warned about: that beneath the MAGA movement lurks a deeper anxiety about foreigners and immigrants themselves.
And so, if Trump’s win is a revolutionary moment for MAGA, the people who voted for the revolution need to define which MAGA they believe in. Does “making America great again” revive the ideals of this country—or the grievances of a group of “native-born” Americans? If MAGA chooses the latter, those on the left who were dismissed as hysterical for crying racism will be vindicated in the worst way.
My grandfather came to America in 1973. He was trained as a surgeon in India, but uprooted his life and reeducated himself in this country after he was recruited by New York Infirmary Hospital to help fill a shortage of doctors and nurses. Now 84, he's a three-time Trump voter who believes bureaucracy killed the practice of medicine and that small businesses are being crushed by regulation. He thinks immigration should be controlled to keep our system functioning.
“Keep your customs,” he often says when speaking about immigrants, “but pick up American ones too.”
Yesterday, I sat with him and his neighbor Maria, who emigrated from Peru, and tried to explain the MAGA fracture I was seeing online. But then I stopped, thinking of the two photos framed above the piano in his house. They show my grandfather shaking hands with two presidents, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, during New York campaign events he attended in the ’90s. He’s proud of both photos, proud to be a Hindu and an Indian, and prouder still to be an American, someone who achieved the American dream.
I didn’t want to fracture that pride with the news of an ugly turn in our country’s politics. How do you tell someone the country they’ve loved for 50 years is harboring a growing faction that wishes he’d never come?
Kiran Sampath is a New-York based writer. She is a reporter and editor for The Juggernaut, where she primarily covers politics within the Indian diaspora.