User:Srp027/sandbox

Out of 43.3 million foreign born persons in the United States, Indian-born Americans account for 6 percent, making them the second largest immigrant group in the US. As of 2015, there were 2.4 million Indian immigrants living in the united states. In 2015, 82% of Indian immigrants were between ages 18-24, and they had higher educational attainment than the foreign- and U.S.-born populations. In the school year 2015-16, 166,000 Indian immigrants were enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions accounting for 16 percent of the 1 million international students. 80% of the students were STEM majors. In 2015, the median income of Indian immigrants was - $107,000 and 7% of the immigrants lived in poverty.

19th century:
(At least one scholar has set the level lower, finding a total of 716 Indian immigrants to the U.S. between 1820 and 1900. ) Emigration from India was driven by difficulties facing Indian farmers, including the challenges posed by the British land tenure system for small landowners, and by drought and food shortages, which worsened in the 1890s. At the same time, Canadian steamship companies, acting on behalf of Pacific coast employers, recruited Sikh farmers with economic opportunities in British Columbia. Racist attacks in British Columbia, however, prompted Sikhs and new Sikh immigrants to move down the Pacific Coast to Washington and Oregon, where they worked in lumber mills and in the railroad industry.

Srp027 (talk) 03:09, 1 April 2019 (UTC) Srp027 (talk) 01:44, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

20th century:
Between 1907 and 1908, Sikhs moved further south to warmer climates in California, where they were employed by various railroad companies. Some white Americans, resentful of economic competition and the arrival of people from different cultures, responded to Sikh immigration with racism and violent attacks.

In the early 20th century, a range of state and federal laws restricted Indian immigration and the rights of Indian immigrants in the U.S. In the 1910s, American nativist organizations campaigned to end immigration from India, culminating in the passage of the Barred Zone Act in 1917. In 1913, the Alien Land Act of California prevented Sikhs (in addition to Japanese and Chinese immigrants) from owning land. However, Asian immigrants got around the system by having Anglo friends or their own U.S. born children legally own the land that they worked on. In some states, anti-miscegenation laws made it illegal for Indian men to marry white women. However, it was acceptable for “brown” races to mix. Many Indian men, especially Punjabi men, married Hispanic women and Punjabi-Mexican marriages became a norm in the West.

Kumar Mazundar was also considered “Caucasian” and was eligible for citizenship. Between 1913 and 1923, about 100 Indians were naturalized but after the 1923 case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that it was ruled that Indians were ineligible for citizenship because they were not “free white persons” and being “Caucasian” was not enough to be considered “white”. About 50 Indians’ citizenship was revoked after this ruling, but Dr. Sakharam Ganesh Pandit fought the ruling of denaturalization. He was a lawyer and married to a white American, and he regained his citizenship in 1927. However, no other naturalization was permitted after the ruling, which led to about 3,000 Indians leaving the United States. Many other Indians had no means of returning to India. One of such immigrants, Vaisho Das Bagai, committed suicide in despair. “The return migration was large enough to render questionable the idea of immigration as a one-way system.”

After the 1917 immigration act, Indian immigration into the U.S. decreased. Illegal entry through the Mexican border became the way of entering the country for Punjabi immigrants. California’s Imperial Valley had a large population of Punjabis who assisted these immigrants and provided support. Immigrants were able to blend in with this relatively homogenous population. The Gadar Party, an Indian anti-British group with operations in California, facilitated illegal crossing of the Mexican border, using funds from this migration “as a means to bolster the party’s finances”. The Gadar Party charged different prices for entering the US depending on whether Punjabi immigrants were willing to shave off their beard and cut their hair. It is estimated that between 1920 and 1935, about 1,800 to 2,000 Indian immigrants entered the U.S. illegally.

Indians started moving up the social ladder by getting higher education. In 1910, Dhan Gopal Mukerji came to UC Berkeley when he was 20 years old. He was an author of many children’s books and won the Newbery Medal in 1928 for his book Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon. However, he committed suicide at the age of 46 while he was suffering from depression. Another student, Yellapragada Subbarow came to the US in 1922. He became a biochemist at Harvard, and “he discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as an energy source in cells, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer.” However, being a foreigner, he was refused tenure at Harvard. Gobind Behari Lal, who came to UC Berkeley in 1912 and became the science editor of the San Francisco Examiner was the first Indian-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

After WWII, U.S. policy re-opened the door to Indian immigration, although slowly at first. The Naturalization Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, repealed the Barred Zone Act of 1917, but limited immigration from the former Barred Zone to a total of 2,000 per year. In 1910, 95% of all Indian-Americans lived on the western coast of the United States. In 1920, that proportion decreased to 75%; by 1940, it was 65%, as more Indian Americans moved to the east coast. In that year, Indian Americans were registered residents in 43 states. The majority of Indian Americans on the west coast were in rural areas, but on the east coast they became residents of urban areas. In the 1940s, the prices of the land increased, and the Bracero program brought thousands of Mexican guest workers to work on farms, which helped shift second-generation Indian American farmers “into commercial, nonagricultural occupations, from running small shops and grocery stores, to operating taxi services and becoming engineers.” In Stockton and Sacramento, a new group of Indian immigrants from the state of Gujarat opened several small hotels. In 1955, 14 of 21 hotels enterprises in San Francisco were operated by Gujarati Hindus. “By the 1980s Gujaratis had come to dominate the industry.” An article published by the National Geography mentions several stories of Gujarati immigrants in the hospitality industry. From 1965 until the mid-1990s, long-term immigration from Indian averaged about 40,000 people per year. From 1995 onward, the flow of Indian immigration increased significantly, reaching a high of about 90,000 immigrants in the year 2000. Srp027 (talk) 03:47, 6 May 2019 (UTC) Srp027 (talk) 20:11, 20 April 2019 (UTC) Srp027 (talk) 20:20, 20 April 2019 (UTC)