 I'm a senior fellow here at the endowment. I want to welcome all of you here today for a very special event, an event that I'm excited about for three reasons. The first reason is this book, The Other 1% Indians in America, is a terrific book. I've actually read it cover to cover. We can have a quiz afterwards. It's remarkable in many ways. It's the first comprehensive book that looks at Indians in America, which is pretty remarkable when you think about it for a community that's an outlier on so many dimensions. And we're going to hear from two of the three authors about why it's an outlier and what makes it an outlier. But it's the first major study of the transformation of the Indian community in America. And if I could quote the economist, which reviewed it in last week's issue, says that it's filled with crunchy analysis, which I think is a technical term, and exudes authority on a hugely neglected subject. And I think what makes it so unique is that it brings together three perspectives. We have an author who's an economist, an author who's a political scientist, an author who's a geographer, and is in an urban studies department. And I want to thank Devesh Kapoor and Sunjoy Chattavorti for coming. Their other co-author, Nirvi Kar Singh, couldn't be with us today. Devesh, as many of you know, is the director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, Cassie, at the University of Pennsylvania, and a professor in political science. Sunjoy is a professor of geography and urban studies at Temple University and a frequent co-conspirator, co-author of Devesh's. The second reason I'm excited is because we have two fabulous discussants today who are going to reflect on some of the themes that Devesh and Sunjoy are going to talk about. Ashley Tellis, who I think in this crowd needs no introduction. My colleague here at Carnegie, who has a pretty unique perspective, I would say, of sort of the insider, outsider as an insider shaping US-India policy, particularly or most notably the US-India nuclear deal. And then as an outsider, probably the leading sort of voice and analyst on US-India relations. And last but certainly not least, an old friend of mine, Sonal Shah, who's now at Georgetown University where she directs the Beak Center for Social Impact and Innovation. Sonal, this might embarrass her a little bit, has one of those resumes that you sort of wonder what you've done with all of your life when you read what she's done. She worked in the Clinton Treasury, in the Obama White House, at Google, Goldman Sachs. It's safe again to work in Goldman Sachs, I hear. The Center for Global Development, the Center for American Progress. And now at Georgetown. And I think although we haven't talked about this, probably the affiliation Sonal is most proud of, if I had to go on a limb, is setting up a nonprofit with her siblings called Indakor, which several of you might know about, which helps to bring Indians who live all over the world to come to India to do public service and work, particularly in the social sectors. And I think that's a unique perspective that Sonal brings. And the third reason I'm excited is, of course, we've just had an election. And many of the issues actually at stake are issues that concern the Indian American community. So whether it's immigration, visas, trade policy, investment, and of course foreign policy and the kind of player that the US is going to be that the US wants India to be, are very much at stake. And so I look forward to having that discussion. So we're going to proceed in the following way. Sunjoy is going to come up and make some introductory remarks. And then he'll hand the floor over to the Vish, who has a slide presentation he's going to make, which is going to bring out some of the key findings. We'll then have a conversation up here and then invite all of you to contribute your questions and perspectives. And I hope you all stay. We'll wrap up at six and adjourn downstairs. And we'll have a reception from six to seven. There are books to be sold, books to be bought, books to be signed, hopefully by the authors. So I invite all of you to join us afterwards. And without further ado, Sunjoy. Thanks. And thanks, everyone, for coming. It's quite an honor and a pleasure to be here. Does the mic on? Yes. I won't say much. We actually won't say much. We kind of developed a Tom and Jerry routine, whereby we do our chase very, very quickly, because a conversation is really most valuable. I just want to say a couple of things. One is it's a big book. It's almost 400 pages. It's of small font. And the font gets smaller towards the end. And lots of graphs and tables. It's crunchy with data. And there's three of us who worked on this. And people have asked us, how do three people write a book together? We don't know. I mean, we did it, but we're still not sure yet how we did it. Because we did start working in our individual silos. But after a while, the kind of the silos kind of began to blur into each other. Nebrikar isn't here, and he'd echo the same thing. And so what Devesh is going to talk about today is very hard to separate, even now when you do it, who did what. And the organization he's going to use is not the organization you're going to see in the book, which is much more structured. He's more of a free flowing, the big hits, which means a lot of the lesser hits would be missing. And a lot of detail, he simply won't be able to even touch upon. Maybe some of it will come up in Q&A, but I hope you enjoy this. The Q&A session is good. Devesh. Thank you all for coming. And thanks, Milan, and Sonal, and Ashley. So I guess what I'm going to do is, of course, to take you very, very rapidly through some of the broad findings of the book, but also put it in a larger context of what is happening around the world on global migration. And migration here to the US. So there are two broad motivations behind this book. One is, how did a population from a low income developing country with weak human capital become the most educated and highest income group in the world's most advanced nation in a single generation? It's not very obvious. So here's the puzzle. This is on the x-axis is the share with graduate and professional degree. On the y-axis is family income. And the countries are all immigrant groups in the United States. So this is by place of birth. And what you can see is just how much of an outlier India is on both education and family income. How did this happen? That's sort of our first motivation. The second is when in 1965, when the Immigration Act was passed, Dean Ross was called in to testify in Congress. And he was called in. And there were some worries expressed by Congress when that, wait, India has 300 million people. He opened the doors. What's going to happen? He said, no, no, no need to worry. We estimate that about 1,600 will come every year for five years. In 2014, India emerged as the largest source of new immigrants to the US and the second largest source of total immigrants only after Mexico. So it's both about the thing about income and education, but also in terms of numbers. There are things that were very unexpected. So what I'm going to try and give you in this presentation is some sense of the context of immigration to the US, some characteristics of the Indian American community, and the classic American story, Becoming American, all immigrants to varying degrees to go down this path. Try and give you some sense of what in the book we argue are some of the reasons this happened and speculate not very much about the future. So the context, immigration to the US. So this is data over two centuries of legal permanent resident status of all immigrants coming to the US. What you'll see is that over time, immigrants grow. There's a bit of a political backlash. There's a setback. Again, it grows. Again, a setback. And this has continued until, of course, the 1965 act in which you see a huge increase. And it's not surprising that we see a political backlash now, pretty similar to stories that occurred about 100 years ago when you had the other major backlash which emerged in 1916, 1917. In this period, what we've seen is a dramatic shift in the sources, the countries and regions from where immigrants come to the US. So the major one in the mid-19th century was the great northern European wave, which shifts in the late 19th, early 20th century to southern and eastern Europe, Italy and Eastern Europe. And what you see now is, of course, the share of Europe has declined very sharply in the past 50 years. And instead, there are the great migrations from the Hispanic migrations and ones from Asia, which now account for three out of four of all new immigrants. Now, what happened, of course, is that the Asian immigrant stops, as I said, 100 years ago when you had the Asiatic barred zone and the green areas are the ones where immigration was legally barred from. And this continued till the passage of the 1965 act. And then you had, of course, this great pivot. And I think history will say that one of the most unexpected, that an act that was passed really had massive unintended consequences that were completely unanticipated, not just for the US, but its implications for around the world. So these are the four largest countries of origin of legal permanent residents in this period. The largest, as you would expect, is the Mexico. In the stock, the second largest is Philippines. Third is India and then China, right? So the last three really are showing the shift, which I'll show at the very end, which is the movement now away from Latin America to Asia in the source of migrants to the United States. Now, what is important to note here is just how recent is the migration from India? This is the share of the resident population that came in 2000 or later. So as of now, this data ends in 2014, but as of today, 60% of all Indians in the United States came after 2000. It's a very young community. And most people don't realize just how young and how rapid this buildup has been nearly in the past 15 years. More Indian immigrants have obtained permanent legal residency in the last 15 years than over the entire 20th century. That sort of shows you the absolute recency of these flows and how and why that has happened. I'm gonna try and explain. Now, basically if you look at this over a long period of time since 1965, so what we have in the book is what we call phase one, the early movers. These were the doctors, the engineers from the IITs, and that was about 12,000 per year, which continues till the late 1970s. Then in phase two is the families. The families are, of course, which is the bulk of legal immigration to the US has been family reunification. That was about 32,000 a year. If that phase had stopped, by and large the Indian American story would not have been particularly different from the average American story to the US. What really changed this is the third phase, which we call the IT generation, where it jumps to about 100,000 a year as of the last few years. And this is really one fundamental difference was the creation of the H1B tech visa, which fundamentally changed the nature of Indian migration to the United States. Now, what are some characteristics of this group? So, as of 2012, of about 3.3 million, about 60% were born in India, 28% in the US and 13% elsewhere, which is in South Asia, Latin America, Africa, UK, et cetera. Of those from India, what you see is that the largest ones are from North India, which is the Hindi speaking belt, followed by Gujarati. Telugu, as you see, is number three. But actually, as of now, as of this year, Telugu has now become, which is the state of Andhra Pradesh, the second largest source of migrants, exceeding that of from Punjab and also from Gujarat. That is singularly being driven by the IT generation. And paradoxically, as we'll show you, it was the result of these hundreds of new private engineering colleges that sprang up in that state and became a major supply line. Now, Indian Americans are outliers among immigrants on three core things. One is on education and income, as we showed. Second is on occupation. They're unusually concentrated in one occupation, which is in tech work, in IT and computers. And the third is they have a very distinct immigration status, in that it has the largest share by far that have come through work visas, rather than through family reunification or asylum, refugee, and other ways of coming like the US. And what we show in this book is how immigrants do in the United States. Depends not just who comes, but how you come. And that's how you enter American labor markets, which has a fundamental role in how well you do in terms of access to income of all universities. Now, the Indian born and US born Indians are very distinct groups and also very different from others. So if you see from the right hand columns, you'll see that the Indian born living in the US, about 68% have a college degree. Just 7.8% of Indians in India have a college degree. Just about 20% of Americans as a whole have a college degree. The other thing which you'll see is age that most of the US born Indians are very young, they're below the age of 25. Whereas most of those born in India who've come to the US are above the age of 25. In fact, for five out of six of those born in India are above the age of 25, five out of six born in the US are below the age of 25. So this cohort of US born Indian Americans and how they are going to do, that wave is still just emerging. It's a, as you would expect, India is a very heterogeneous society. So it's fairly, it's not surprising that the Indian American community is also quite heterogeneous. There is increasing variation in terms of where the immigrants are coming from, from India. And as I said, there's a rise of speakers from the South which is Telugu and Tamil, as well as the Hindi speaking belt. And a relative decline from Gujarat and Punjab relative to especially the 70s and 80s. This graph it tells you about their incomes across different states. And one way to read it is in each state, we've compared the average incomes of Indian Americans in that state with the average income of that state. And what you'll see is in each state their incomes are higher than the average. So if you look at California, the average income of family income in California is about 70,000. The average income of Indian Americans in California is about 115,000, right? But as you can see, because there's variation in income across American states, that is reflected here as well. The second is by ethnic group, what you'll see is that the lowest incomes are of Punjabi speakers. And the highest are ones which are the new immigrants, communities, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada, these are all from the south of India, as well as from Maharashtra and from Bengal. But one should add that even with that, the average income of the Punjabi speakers is higher than the average income of the full US population. So it's just that they're the lowest among the Indians in the US. Now the advantages of income in the US, of course, are it shapes where you live, right? And so four fifths of the Indian American population live in counties with medium household incomes, at least one standard deviation above the need. We argue in the book that this has structural issues because inequality is carried now in the US through where you live, because that gives access to schools and the access to schools then has an intergenerational effect on inequality. So now this inequalities will get reflected in the second generation's life chances. What's interesting is that the highest income groups and the lowest income groups are all basically in two states, in New York and California and actually live very close to each other. This is, we have these maps in the book. This is in some New York and you can see that the lowest income groups which are in places like Queens live very close to places with the highest income groups in Long Island and Kutukenich. Now of course the classic American story is immigrants come and gradually, gradually become part of the larger American mainstream and we call this sort of assimilation or in any other similar work. So what's happening here? So one is way in which communities assimilate is simply by where they live, right? What we call residential clustering, right? So think of a China town or a Korea town which are ethnically concentrated communities and that has put some limitations on assimilation, right? What you see here is a chart which is from the census data and what you see is that of all the major Asian American groups, the Indian Americans are the least residentially clustered. They're the most spatially dispersed in terms of where they live. So to the extent that where you live and is a marker of assimilation, this actually group has a greater assimilation because they are much more dispersed in their housing choices. The second is, which is occupational clustering which is what we see is the red line is about software because IT is so concentrated in areas like Silicon Valley, Austin, the suburbs of Washington DC. Those in that occupation largely came on the H1V visa and they had to go where the jobs were. So you see much greater residential clustering. The doctors, which is the one at the bottom, they, which is the medical, they came largely on J1 visas and the J1 visas you had to go, you could only stay in the US if you went and served in underserved communities. So if you read a book by, say, Abraham Vergiz, my own country, which has a very nice thing about this, it's about the arrival of AIDS in small town US. And small town US, most of the doctors are all foreign doctors because American trained doctors don't want to go to these places. So a condition of this group to remain in the US is that they serve in underserved areas. So you go to places like Johnson City, Tennessee. There are very few non-whites, but all of those who are actually doctors from all over the world. So you see a much greater dispersion in depending by the profession. This is about the language spoken at home and as you would expect between the first generation and the second generation, the use of English rises very sharply and the so-called the mother tongue or the tongue spoken by the parents that use begins to decline quite sharply between the first and the second generations. This is something which we spend some time in the book. So one part of his simulation is, do you carry the social norms of your country when you move from A to B? And how sticky are these social norms, right? This is about the representation of different groups in managerial and professional occupations, which in the US census are the occupations with the highest incomes. And what you see is that in the first generation, the Indians are at the bottom and they have the highest representation in managerial and professional occupations. Indian women also have the highest, but the men have a relatively higher percentage. When you go to the second generation, actually it begins to reverse. Indian women of the second generation have a higher representation in managerial and professional occupations compared to the first generation. But even in the second generation, the advantages of the first generation seem to be carried through. In both cases, they have the highest representation, but the gender reversal is taking place. Now what about the political behavior? Elections are over, so in some ways it's moot now. But I think one of the things that surprised us was that they're the most democrat-leaning group of any large immigrant group. Now this was surprising for the following reasons. One is many of them are entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs in general don't like regulations which seem to be something that the democrats favor. The doctors don't like to talk law, et cetera, which again, the talk lobby seem to be more to democrats. Generally higher income also tended to work republican. They are also socially conservative in terms of family values and importance to family, which is also seen as a republican sort of trade. For all of these, you might expect that they should have been moored, but it's exactly the opposite. They are the most democrat, and I'll show you. Now this is, you know, so in terms of numbers, it's of course small. It's 1% of the US population, and about half is naturalized, two-thirds of them vote. So it's a really tiny vote share. But what we'll show you is that even tiny numbers do matter. So this is a graph of seeing which congressman came to Prime Minister Modi's Madison Square Garden event. So Indian Prime Minister came and gave a, you know, highly noticed talk at Madison Square Garden. And what you see is that the congressman in whose constituencies Indian Americans are less than 5%, the probability of their showing up was 2.9%. And if the, but in those constituencies, but it was more than 0.5%, the probability rose about fourfold. So even small numbers, congressmen do care about numbers in their own constituencies, even though of course at the US level at the aggregate, it's a pretty small number. This was a, this is based on survey data which I had done in 2004. And the important thing here to note is that look, immigrants who have been less than five years, more than a quarter don't have strong for political identification, which is expected, you know, people don't come with these views. But the longer they stay, they begin to form political identities, the more they shift towards being Democrat rather than Republican, right? So time of stay actually increases your likelihood of becoming Democrat if you are Indian American. This is the 2008 election. You can see the gap between voting for Obama and McCain. It's about, you know, I mean there is, it's one of the widest gaps of any group. This is a survey done by the University of California on Asian American political behavior. And if you see, I've just taken out two groups, Indian and Chinese Americans for contrast. So if you see the percentage, for instance on support for Obama, you see the contrast between the numbers from the Chinese American community and the Indian American, it's very stark. Now what's interesting is if you look at, at that point, favorable impression of Donald Trump. So what you see is that Indians were much more popularized. A slightly more fraction had favorable impressions for Trump, but a much larger fraction had very unfavorable impressions of Trump. I asked a Chinese American friend about this and he said, look, it's just that Indians are far more open-headed people. So, you know, we keep our preferences closer to ourselves. Now this is the one they did in October. By that time you see the shift, this is for all the major Asian American groups. And you see here that again, so Asian Indians along with Korean Americans had the highest support for the Democrats and among, and the least for Trump. So again, you see a very, very stark contrast. And survey after survey, election after election, since the early 2000s, has consistently followed very similar patterns. There is very little variance. Now, we're trying to give you a flavor of how in the book we try to explain these outcomes. And what we argue is that the core of this is really a selection story. Look, it can't be anything to do about Indian because if Indians were good, India would be in a very different place and people would not leave India like to begin with. So that can't be the story. So what we say is that there's a triple selection. There's a selection within India. India's social hierarchies mean that there have been these dominant castes, these upper castes who had selective access to higher education, et cetera. Then a very sort of exam-based system in India which does a screening process, again a second selection. And a third selection is the selection of immigration policy in the US which favors those especially in STEM fields who enter the US at least legally. So in some ways, this is just a way to think about this which is we know that the average human capital in India is much less than the average human capital in the US. But those who are coming to the US from India are from the tail end of the distribution of Indian human capital and that average is higher than the American average. So you're really drawing from a tail end of a distribution and comparing that to the average of another distribution. So of course these are in a sense, you're comparing apples and oranges. But that is not the entire story. So what we have is a series of additional factors that, so one is that India's very failures in manufacturing meant that a lot of engineers went into services especially in IT. It so happened when they came and the reason they came is the sector that was expanding the most in the US was in IT. So you could imagine if you had come as an engineer but joined a steel company, your income growth would have been fairly muted. It just so happened that you went into IT and you went into IT because there was far fewer experiences and manufacturing jobs in India itself. So in a sense, compared to immigrants of similar qualifications and compared to the past when you had to climb up the stairs, this group, it got on to the elevator and the elevator took them up because the sector itself was expanding so rapidly. The second is of course concentration in certain occupations and this is physicians. So this you can see starts much earlier. It starts from the early 50s. By the middle of the Vietnam War, one out of six of every physician joining the American physician labor force was trained in India. It was a massive outflow from India to the United States. We have, we even looked at their exam results and you see that they are really complete outlier in the exam results of all foreign trained immigrant, foreign trained physicians who are coming. But this, as you can see, has begun to drop because the US itself is training many more physicians. The third is these concentrations. So this is about PhDs, right? If you look at, there are about 95,000 Indians, people born in India with PhDs in the US. To give you some contrast, India trains about 20,000 PhDs a year of about, this is a pure estimate, at most 10% is of the quality year. So in some ways India has gifted to the US half a century of its capital stock in PhDs in the way it trains, which is a massive flight of best and brightest from India, and so it's hardly surprising that they do well when they are here. Then this is the point which I had made earlier is if you compare Chinese immigrants and Indian immigrants, in terms of education levels, there isn't that much of a difference in terms of college. But what you see is a far bigger fraction of Chinese immigrants to the US are coming as refugees or basically as asailis actually, not refugees. Whereas a much larger fraction of Indian immigrants are coming on employment based preferences. So what happens is that the Indian immigrants hit the labor market already at a salary above the US median salary because you do not get the visa unless your salary is above the average. Whereas if you come in as an asaili, you have to struggle to find a job. And it's not always easy because people don't recognize your institution, et cetera, et cetera. So that, how you come to the US and the visa type has a tremendously important effect on how well you do in American labor markets. The third is just the, sorry, historical. It just so happened that the United States and India were colonized by the same power. And so both have similar languages which they do well at. And so, and we know that language skills matter for labor market success. Then one thing which is there, which we noticed was that one aspect of the Indian community, it is a very socially conservative community. So this is sort of data on families I share of households, married couples I share of families and the family poverty rate, which you'll see is the lowest among the Indian Americans. And one reason is they are far higher fraction of two income families. And a reason for that is if you see here, which is the marital status in the US and what you'll see is that the percentage currently married for Indians is far higher than any other group. And if you look at children's living arrangements, which is percentage of children living with two married parents. Again, the Indian average, which is 92%, compared that with the US population, which is 63%. Now what that means is that the children are growing up in households with larger incomes. Because it's not now individual income that matters, it's household income. And that additional advantage of means that you can spatially live in places with better schools, et cetera, which in turn give you further advantages, given the nature of the US system. Now in the book, we sort of make a case for other things. This is the technology and policy changes. It's part of a larger migration that is taking place from India, which is favoring skill-based migration. And I think here, of course, the key thing was fundamentally the accident of the IT revolution and the creation of, and the policy changes, which is the creation of the H1B and the L1 programs, which were really prior to the mid-90s were of a very limited nature. And in India, what happened was, so was a higher education got liberalized. So in 1985, there were 58,000 seats in engineering, in 2016, there were 1.5 million. Now, the quality of most of those is pretty bad, but all you need is the top 10%, you still have a very large number, which is part of this supply chain. Then what you see is, what is happening to Indian migration, it's very concentrated in the Anglo-Saxon countries, very different from China. Indian migrants are now the largest migrant group in the UK and Canada, second largest in the US, third largest in New Zealand, and will soon be the third largest in Australia, and even in Ireland, they're emerging as one of the largest groups. So again, very concentrated in Anglo-Saxon countries. And in that group of migrants, they've now emerged as the most educated immigrants of all immigrants in OECD countries. So the US is actually not an outlier as far as Indian migration to OECD countries is concerned. It's part of a pattern of the high-skill migration from a lower-income country like India to higher-income countries of the OECD. But I'll end with some unintended consequences. One is, I think there's a new paper out from the Peterson Institute, which has this interesting thing, that the US-India labor migration relationship in its economic value actually exceeds all of India's goods and services exports to the US. This is actually the core part of the economic relationship between the US and India. These temporary workers, they contribute more than three billion annually to US social insurance funds. Because of a lack of a totalization agreement between the two countries, and the US has signed it with 24 other countries, basically this has meant a transfer of between $5 to $10 billion in the last 15 years from Indian workers to the US tax system. Because the reason is very simple. If the H1B visa is valid for three years and then for another three years, some of them stay, some go back. You don't get your social security is not vested until you work for at least 40 quarters, which is a decade. Many of them go backs. They make the contributions, but never collect, and that's a net transfer. A totalization agreement is supposed to offset this, but for very good reasons, since the US is now getting about a billion dollars a year from these, it has no incentive to sign such an agreement with India. I think there's good reason to believe that they are an important threat in weaving this fabric of the bilateral relationship. I was going to put more slides on this, then I realized that Ashley is here, so discretion became the better part of valor. So I'll only have one slide on this and he will take over. But I think, I mean, my sense is that their role has been facilitative. It has not been causal. There were fundamental changes occurring and they helped the pace of change, but not the direction of change. But I think it also comes through is that immigrants are quite invested on the US-India relationship, but this first generation is much less. The first generation's political concerns are much more to do with what is happening within the US rather than what is happening in India. And that's really part of the assimilation that happens of all immigrants because this is the country that they see their future in. What is the future? Well, I put a question mark, since I have very little idea. We thought, when we finished the book, we were a little more confident, but I think we are much less confident now. So, this is something that was done by Pew in 2014. So this is what Pew had projected based on what was there till 2015. And what they had sort of projected, what you see is right of immigrants, if you see from 1965, whites were 80% of immigrants. By, they had become a minority by the mid-80s, a minority among immigrants who were coming. And you see how the Hispanic one began to take over as the dominant source of migrants. And what they had projected was by the middle of the century, because of demographic changes occurring in South America itself, that the major source is actually going to move to Asia away from Latin America. And by 2050. Now, this was 2015. We are now in a different era. So, I think what I would end with saying, look, despite the recent very large increase in immigrants from India, 60% have come after 2000, mainly through skill-based parts, I think the future is definitely more uncertain, especially on the H1B visa program. And, you know, also, weights of permanent residency, et cetera, are going to be harder. Immigration reforms are very unlikely to take place. All of these uncertainties mean that it is possible that this wave of immigration has peaked. That, thank you. Yeah, you tell me, babe. Yes, so I'm going to sit on the end, right? You should actually have them in the middle. Have them in the middle. Yeah, why don't you guys sit on the end? Sure. I'll take the flank. I always sit to the side. Are we getting ready? Yeah. So, I have lots and lots of questions for you, but I'm going to forgo my questions because I'm sure many of you have questions and I want to immediately bring in Ashley and Sonal. So, Ashley, let me start with you. I mean, in fact, the way that the VESH ended is the way that I want to start, one on, you know, the foreign policy and then the second on the kind of domestic side. But, Ashley, I mean, this is a question that I get a lot. I'm sure many in this room get a lot, which is, you know, what has been the contribution of the diaspora to the evolution of U.S. indi-relations? Especially as it's not causal, it's sort of facilitated, it's to be a factor among factors. I mean, you've seen this when you're in government. Now you've reflected on it outside of government. I mean, how would you characterize that? I think there's no simple answer to it because there are different facets to the bilateral relationship. And the diaspora plays differently depending on that facet. So, let me identify four areas where I think it's worth sort of thinking through analytically. The first is the area of high politics. And by high politics, I mean the strategic relationship between the two countries and the things that happen at the highest levels of state-to-state engagement. When you think of high politics, I think the impact of the diaspora has been minimal because the transformations at the level of high politics have been driven by the leadership of the two sides. And the leadership of the two sides has been motivated by strategic factors that have little to do with the diaspora. If you look at the second area, which is the area of what political science would be called low politics, which is broad patterns of economic engagement, right? I think the impact of the diaspora has been significant. And Devesh's and Sanjoy's data shows you exactly why. That from the beginning of Indian migration to the United States, there has been a very strong economic impact, whether it's been in the area of medical services, whether it's been in the area of IT, and so on and so forth. So when it comes to the wharf and wharf of sort of doing business, the presence of Indian Americans has been fundamental. And what has happened in Silicon Valley in terms of innovation, in business has only sort of reinforced that. So that's one area where I think the impact has been very pronounced. Now there are also some negative issues which come with transient labor and we can talk more about that. But either way, I think this is an area where the diaspora is adding impact. The third area is what I would identify as symbolic politics. And this is where I think again, there has been a great impact that the diaspora has had. In fact, I think it has had its highest impact because the assimilation of the community has been so spectacularly successful. So today it is seen as a model minority. It has seen, it has seen as a community which sort of represents the apex of the American dream. They become Americans in a way that we would like to see all immigrants become. So symbolically, it becomes a very powerful force in the political process. And the last area is the area that I would identify as domestic politics. And I think here, the impact of the diaspora is potentially significant, but we are not yet there. And the reason for that is exactly what Devesh identified, the difference between U.S.-born Indians who are not part of the political process and sorry, Indian-born Americans and U.S.-born Americans because U.S.-born Americans are the cohort just coming into the political process. I think in time, you will begin to see a much more significant presence in the bureaucracy, in politics, in political appointments, and so on and so forth. So that is an area to watch. So when you do a net assessment, it's really a sort of differentiated impact. And you really have to look at issue area by issue area to make a judgment about what that impact has been. Let me pick up and ask you some on the last bit, which is U.S.-domestic politics. I mean, you've been involved for many years in mobilizing the Indian-American community, political engagement of Asian-Americans. We keep hearing that this election cycle, Indian-Americans are really gonna have an impact, I promise, and then it never seems to sort of happen. Now, this year, paradoxically, although Indian-Americans technically or traditionally vote Democratic and Trump won the presidency, you have five Indian-American Congress people, you have an Indian-American senator, you have an Indian-American potential cabinet pick in Nikki Haley. So many people are saying that this is actually, the time has arrived, you know, this has been a watershed moment in 2016. Is that, would you agree with that? Yeah, it's a good question. But before getting to that, let me just say, I think for those that haven't read the book and I just wanna pick up on your point earlier, which is there's so much data in this book. I would urge you to look at the book because it is really hard to do a comprehensive study on a population and get that many people to respond to surveys and follow up. And so I think the fact that somebody actually took the effort to do that gives us a lot more insight than we've had. And in many cases, I mean, maybe Ashley will fill in, it's like, we make a lot of assumptions and here you have a lot of data to back either assumptions or not, but I think that's part of it. On the domestic side, you know, I'd say it's been growing over time. I don't think there's, this is like watershed moment per se, but I think when you've seen the active engagement of Asian-Americans, but also the Indian-American community over, I think the last maybe two decades into the politics arena, whether it is appointments in the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, running for office when you had Bobby Jindal run for governor of Louisiana, Nikki Haley running for governor of North Carolina, you're beginning to see more of that starting to happen and more in Congress now too. And what's been interesting is that we've actually run for more of the bigger offices and less of the smaller offices. So city council, school boards, mayors, the Indian-American community doesn't run for those, but we run for Congress and we run for governor. Right, but not much else. And it's kind of interesting or we want appointments in the political process. And it will be interesting to see, and I'd be interested even over the long term to see if we start getting engaged at much more local levels where one could argue that's where the power really actually happens. So how money gets spent in the mayoral elections or what happens in state houses. While there are some, it's very few that have applied for that. So it's actually, it'll be interesting to see, I'm not sure it's a watershed moment yet, but I think the active engagement and with the fact that the generation is yet to still arrive will show a lot more. So Ashley, I mean, you know, if that's true, and we know that immigration is a hot-button issue, and the immigration from India potentially vulnerable to a new political climate that is much more skeptical about immigration, although that skepticism has been targeted not necessarily at H1Bs, although there's been some, it's been largely coming from the Southern border. How much of this concerns you, like looking out into the future, come January 20th? I mean, in respect of what one thinks about the prospects, right? I think the risks are very real because what the vicious data shows is that the bulk of recent immigration is really employment-based immigration, and the success of employment-based immigration is really a function of vague arbitrage. And because it's a function of vague arbitrage, it is susceptible to all kinds of protectionist solutions for the right and wrong reasons. And I think this is an issue that we don't know what the answers are going to be, but this is going to be a very contested issue in American politics because there are direct consequences for the native-born labor force, and because there are consequences for the native-born labor force, there is a direct impact on political outcomes. So I see this as being one of the biggest issues that the Trump administration will have to deal with when it comes to Indian Americans. Most of the other issues are issues that can be resolved executive branch to executive branch. They don't impact mass politics in any fundamental way, but this one does. And so depending on the broad direction of immigration policy in this country, I think Indian Americans have the potential to be affected disproportionately because of all the data that that nation's been out there. And so if you were to flip the lens a little bit and say, let's focus on New Delhi rather than Washington, how would you advise the Modi government to take stock of this? And what are the sorts of things they should be doing or could be doing to try to position themselves for this potential new set of reality? I mean, even that question today is harder to answer than usual, right? Because if one were to presume that the Trump administration would stick to the canonical approach to international politics, the canonical American approach to international politics which has been in place for the last 60 years, then there are some simple suggestions that one could offer, which is continue to work the bilateral relationship at the highest levels, continue to communicate to the United States the importance of building the strategic partnership and so on and so forth. But I think the fundamental uncertainty going forward is that I do not quite know how the next administration sees America's role in the world and what it believes American responsibilities with respect to protecting that liberal order are. And unless one has answers to those fundamental questions, it's hard to offer any advice, helpful or unhelpful, to Delhi offer that matter to Washington with respect to how Delhi should think about its relationship with the United States or Washington ought to think about its relationship with India. So I think we need much more clarity with respect to how the next administration will think about America's own relationship with the world before one can presume to offer Mr. Modi any suggestions about how he should respond. I mean, Sonu, I wanted to ask you one particular bit of this which is you spend most of your day thinking about innovation and technology and social entrepreneurship. And one could make a case that those ties, those businesses, they're on pretty strong footing. If there are changes around the margins, maybe there won't be such a big impact. I mean, is this something that when you think about the contributions that Indian American CEOs make in firms and in places like Silicon Valley, I mean, is that really vulnerable? Are we, should we be worried to that keep us up at night? Let me just take a variation of your answer, Ashley, and just say that one could argue that if you're Modi, you go to the CEOs, the American CEOs and saying, what are you gonna do to preserve the jobs and make a deal with them that they go work with the administration because from a business perspective, it's a good thing for them. But one could argue that. I mean, I'm not saying that that's the right thing to do, but it's an argument you could take. I, you know, it's interesting, Silicon Valley versus the banking industry are gonna be the interesting conversations in this because the East Coast is winning, right? I mean, the banking industry, Goldman Sachs all gonna do well given the appointments that are gonna happen. A lot of the tech talent actually is going into the banking financial side where they are the back end to Goldman, to Bank of America, to any of the banking industry technology, which is what is now running banking anyway. And Silicon Valley I think is trying to figure out where it's gonna play its role in part of this because they were so strongly anti-Trump and how they managed to manage that relationship is actually gonna be interesting and where innovation, like I think the bigger thing is gonna be where is infrastructure gonna be because that is gonna be the big push that's gonna happen and that's gonna be where the financial plays is gonna be and where is immigration gonna fall into the infrastructure bill and what falls into infrastructure? Is it going to be technology infrastructure? Is it gonna be what other kind of infrastructure are we talking about? That's where it's gonna be interesting and I'm kind of with Ashley. I think we have to see some of this play out a little bit but I would say the biggest economic play is gonna be infrastructure, not technology and innovation. I think that's where he's gonna put most of his time and money but that's my guess given if you were to follow the promises of the campaign. It's an interesting point that comes out of that, Milam, to my mind and I agree with Sonal completely that the corporate America will always see it to be in its interests, to maintain the visa streams that have expanded its competitiveness and its ability to be viable internationally. But sustaining those visa streams now comes into conflict with another very powerful social coalition that brought Donald Trump to power. And so I think an interesting question that comes out of the answer that you offered is how does he juggle the competition between corporate America that will look for ways to protect the existing system and support the immigration that has occurred in the last seven years versus those native born Americans who increasingly see these visa streams as threats or at least potentially see them as threats. And so how Trump sort of adjudicates these two social coalitions that could be an odds, I think will determine the answer to the question you asked, which is what is the future of immigration in this country? I mean, if you're for, do you say I'll keep the plant here but you keep my visa status, right? Those are the questions that you start asking of like where the deals get made. If you're a carrier, you say, you know, keep the H1B visa, but I'll keep my plant here. And is that the trade offs you make? I don't know what the trade offs are gonna be. I think that's our question, that's the big question. Sundry, I wanna bring you in because this discussion has focused a lot on the sort of people who are doing well, high-skilled H1B, but one of the fundamental points of the book is it's not a monolithic ethnic immigrant community. There are in median terms, yes, they're doing very well, but you have this pretty amazing statistic where you look at Indian Americans in the New York Metro region, you have both the best off Indian Americans and the worst off Indian Americans and basically living side by side and the best sort of in the presentation alluded to that. Do we give short shrift to the people who are below the median oftentimes? Or is that, how do you draw that out a little bit in the book? Yeah, we do get taken up by the moment, don't we? Right now we are, you know, Trump consumes all the oxygen everywhere. And probably way more oxygen than he deserves, really. I, for me, the question I'll come to you is, let me give a long, long mission answer. It is, for me, the big change coming up is the test of American institutions. There's a new kind of political force which is not beholden to older arrangements and strategies, and he's gonna push at some fundamental institutions, putting the media and H1B, the one that concerns us. How well do institutions stand up? How quickly can one precedent change rules? How quickly does he have to deliver in order to win the next round of the Senate? It's just this. And how quickly can those two seats turn around? If the moment the Senate goes, it becomes a different discourse. So for me, it is really going to be a big push against some prevailing old standing institutions and how they hold up. And the institutional story basically feeds into our focus on the winners, our focus on the oxygen consumers, really kind of diverts attention from the other. And the other, in the case of this particular population, because it's so selected, is not doing very poorly by American standards. There are large income gaps within the population. No more in New York, in particular, as Dimash's map showed. We don't pay attention to these things. We pay attention to big cities, not to the small towns. We pay attention to New York and not to this Indiana. This is what we do, and sometimes, they bite you back, if the numbers are right. Do we, as analysts, miss something by not paying enough attention? Probably we do, but one of the things that's happened with the literature on Indian Americans so far is it's so piecemeal, right? I mean, there really is nothing that holds it together. There's some people who've looked at taxi drivers, for instance. Almost nobody's looked at the Sikh farmers in California Central Valley. Almost nobody's looked clearly at, there's a group, some attention has looked at the motel industry, but very little really structurally on Silicon Valley, the IT industry. So what I suspect is our book should contribute to a kind of an opening up of different avenues and areas in which, and of serious minded people can start digging and part of it is the bottom third or the bottom quarter, which happens to be very, very geographically elastic. I think at this point, let me open it up and move to your questions. If you could just identify yourself. Rachel has, and Beck have microphones, just keep your questions short and we'll do one quick round and then ask the panelists to respond and then if we have time we'll do a second round. So let's start Claudio. One second, Claudio. Claudio, Lillian felt my affiliation is not really particularly relevant to this gathering, but I'm a Lillian scientist. You've focused a lot in this conversation on the question of immigration, but in reality the implications of what goes forward isn't just about immigration in the book as I see the presentation is a lot about also who's here already today, including people who are full up citizens. I've worked in government for a long time and what I've seen the transformation over the last 15, 20 years in Washington in terms of I think representation of the very sort of things that were discussed DeVish and others earlier, the presence of Indian Americans in the American bureaucracy that went from essentially zero to infinity. I mean the numbers are pretty phenomenal on the Hill and the executive branch elsewhere. Obviously some of you mentioned some of the political leaders are ambassadors of India. We have, and so there's a lot of people throughout society who are of Indian origin who aren't sort of subject to this sort of question of immigration. And one of the big questions is what will the political influence and role and activism be of that community going forward regardless of what happens on immigration. I'd be interested in just understanding a little bit more about how the existing community might increasingly have an impact on how things move forward. Thank you. Great. Yeshwant here, Rachel. Rachel in the first row. Sometimes. Take one more in the back there. You, Becca, can you get a mic? My name is Kanan Srinivas and I am the Secretary of the Asian Caucus of Democratic Party of Virginia. So I actually like it this way. And we are actually worried about this cycle when I'm also the treasurer of the Loudoun County Democratic Party when the Republicans made a very strong concentrated in Loudoun County with the Trump campaign coming. So my question to the author is great data. What percentage of naturalized Indian Americans, I read two thirds, that you found are voting in the election cycle. Is that right or do you see a big variation because right in Loudoun, right in Northern Virginia, we in the Democratic Party, we see a different numbers trending where we would love more participation of Indian Americans. Maybe it's local to Northern Virginia. I'm very local. I think only about Loudoun. So maybe it's a local trend, but if it's a two third voting percentage nationwide, that's not a bad number. I just wanted to ask. Great, so three questions. So Claudio is about not so much the immigrants that are those who are US citizens and their political activism. I know you guys address the political issue on why Indian Americans vote Democratic. So maybe you want to touch on that and then anything you have on data, naturalized. Just starting, you know, voting behavior. So in general, immigrants who naturalize tend to vote less than the native born. I'm talking of in general, across the US, all immigrants in general who naturalize, they vote, they go to the voting booth less than those who were born in the US. What we also find is Asian immigrants tend to vote less than Hispanic immigrants. Now, there is a lot of debate on why that might be the case. It's not very conclusive. So Indian American voting behavior in terms of participation is really fairly consistent with broader participation of immigrants and Asian Americans. It's not particularly distinctive. The distinctive is why they vote or at least they express their preferences towards one party more most acutely. Now, the closest we found is actually work from a range of dissertations, et cetera, which is more ethnographic work. There's no real survey work on this on the why is actually religion. The core thing there was a sense that why this work shows is that early 2000s, you know, there was reasons, especially after George Bush made, you know, this dramatic nuclear deal, you know, there was a very favorable reaction like to that. But what you see in the interviews at least is a deep concern about the role of evangelical Christianity on the Republican Party. That comes through pretty unambiguously, at least in the interview to data. More recently, of course, but this is much more recent, is that in general, the Democrat Party has been far more relatively more open to immigrants and immigration. And the Republicans, the tone has become more shrill in the Republican Party about immigrants in general, not Indian American, but immigrants in general. So I think these two in combination have been, it appears to be the primary reasons for this, this preference which seems to go against their economic interests. One would also have to add race to this, I think. And it's once, as they've said, there aren't very clear studies that could, you know, parse out the contribution of evangelical immigration race, but they're all part of the mix. But the point that you made about the book being a lot about people who are already here is an important one. And I'd like to slightly underline the fact that five out of the six Indians born in the US are very young. I mean, a lot of them are in school, not yet voting. And out of that population, the number of Indians that are born in the US that are over the age of 50 is just 12,000. It's a very small population base, out of which a whole number of names that have been discussed in the book come up with that very small population base. That population base is gonna hit 500,000 very, very quickly at coming up with age. And they will, I suspect, and I'm not gonna speak for the rest of the year, they will probably be fairly politically active, probably, as Sonal pointed out, seeking positions in city councils, in school boards. I think there are some incident signs, but there's a big demographic push of the people who are already here, born existing regardless of whatever immigration rules change down the line. And they will have, particularly because they're clustered, especially because the IT population is very, very clustered, they will have increasingly significant influences in localized elections, localized democratic processes. So sorry, the 12,000 number is US-born Indians over the age of 50 is 12,000 people. That's it, that's it. Burmese, Indral, Nikke Helikis. Out of that little group comes two governors, senators, and all of these people that we are seeing. I mean, that's really, if you add, say, another five years to that age thing, you add another 10,000 people. Yes, you're right, they're very close, but they're not clustered yet. Let me hypothesize two thoughts of why the Indian American community also goes into public service, whether it's in the civil service side or in the political side. One, a fairly high level of education, and many of them, I could hypothesize, probably not on that much debt. So parents have probably paid for the education, so you're not having to deal with the debt burdens of many others in the population. And secondly, come from fairly high income-ish families, so you can afford to take a little bit more risk. And I would put myself in that category, but I would probably put a lot of people of my colleagues that are in either in the politics process or in the civil service process having the ability to do that. And those things we see consistently is when you have a little bit of the risk, you tend to take public service, you do a public service because you have the ability to do it and have a safety net that you can fall back on. We have about five more minutes, so let's take a couple more questions before I wrap it up. Yeah, you've been, head your hand up, please. Hi, my name is Sid. I'm a student at SICE. I had a question about political organization. We touched on that a little bit. I've noticed in recent years there've been different ways of organizing the Indian American community. So we've had, like, either the umbrella of Asian American Pacific Islanders or Indian American and recently even a subset for Hindu Americans. So I wanted to know what the change has been in recent years, the bridge from textbooks in California to actual political organization nationwide, and why has that change happened and where is it going in the future? The question is mostly for the authors and firsts. Thank you. Bergees? My name is Bergees George. I write for the Hindu. My question to Devesh, actually, you spoke about how the disproportionate influence of evangelical Christians on the Republican Party may have been a damper for Indian Americans. But the current election cycle, the attempt to hype up this anti-Islam sentiment, has it, anyway, qualitatively affected how Indians respond to both these parties? All right, we have to have a way. There's no woman who's asked the question we've got. There you go, come on. Too many male questions here. Let's get one sec for the mic. Hi, this is Anita Wadwani. I work for DOD Policy. But my question was the statistic on second generation women. We saw the shift where they're becoming more managers in higher level positions. Do you have more thoughts on that and why we're seeing that and how that will continue? So let's stop there and maybe just go down the line and we have about five minutes. So why don't I start with Sonal? Any of those topics you want to touch upon? I'm going to leave the last two questions to Vivish and Sundra because they probably have better answers to that. On the political organization, I think it's more of an evolving landscape of how we politically organize. I think you tend to see in each election cycle different evolutions that seem to take place. So the Hindu coalitions this time, you're beginning to see political organizing in terms of topics. So what you saw with the textbooks, but other topics may also become, but they also fall into other political organizing principles too. So it's not always the same. I think the biggest issue that we probably face as a community is voter registration. There's no consistency of voter registration. It's haphazard at four year election cycles, but very little in terms of thinking about just getting the registration done before you can even get to the organizing of getting anything else done. And that's been fairly haphazard. It's not, we have social groups that care about the issues whether it's the low income social issues or whether it's the tech community or whether it's the defense issues, but not consistency in terms of the way the Asian Americans have done in terms of really getting to the voter registration. So we fall within somewhere between that, but as a consistency of the Indian American community, it's not been that consistent across the board. Yeah, I'll try to kind of address, hopefully some of the questions raised, but a big thing that I don't know how successfully we've talked about it today, which is the diversity in the Indian American. This is a very diverse group. It's linguistically diverse. It's, we know there's some religious diversity. We're not sure how much because we don't have the data. There's political diversity. And I think it's important for us to kind of recognize that the kind of politics, and they wish touched upon it, the kind of politics that we kind, we immerse ourselves in here, the issues, the idea of liberal and conservative policies. They don't have the same salience back home. Not only do they don't have the same salience, but between Andhra Pradesh, which is a big center now, and Gujarat, which was a big center earlier, they don't have the same salience either. So to what extent is there carry over politics? To what extent are political ideologies formed in your early years? To what extent those ideologies are transmitted successfully or not to the next generation, which is coming of age, increasing rapidly in numbers? These to me are kind of the, I would say the scholarly questions that we should be interested in. I fully appreciate the organizational issues. But my sense is, I don't think you can get to the organizational issues. Did you have asked the more fundamental questions about how is behavior being mediated by identity of origin and through generations? And I think there's a bunch of open questions on that. Sounds like somebody should fund another book. This one was unfunded, so. So we have actually a whole analytical section on organizations. So this goes back to sort of Tocqueville's observation about the US, that how Americans organize themselves. And we wanted to see, because this is part of the assimilation process of immigrants. And of course they organize, and we have a whole thing on, they organize themselves around religion, they organize themselves around professional groups. If it is a professional group, then you see the appellation South Asian mode, rather than a more narrower definition. What's interesting is that activists and academics see the appellation South Asian much more than Indian Americans themselves do, by a long shot. Very few Indian Americans identify themselves as South Asians, it's 3% or something. So if you see in the surveys, they ask different Asian American groups, do you see yourself as, which hyphen? Is it American? Is it Asian American? Is it Indian American? Is it Indian? Is it South Asian? South Asian is by far the lowest. But if you look at academics who work on this, they think South Asian is the by far dominant. Departments are organized, conferences are organized. Funding streams. Funding streams are organized. There is a complete mismatch between how people think of their identities and how academics think their identities ought to be. I feel sad by the academic. The other kind of academic. The other kind, the other 1% of academics. I think at some point it would be useful to go back to Claudia's question and ask whether the Indian Americans who are already here who are not recent immigrants would add anything distinctive as they become more and more involved in the political process. And my hypothesis going forward is that they probably won't. That they will, other than the demographic sort of characteristic of being Indian American by heritage, they will end up being Americans because if the data shows anything at all, what it's showing is a very successful trajectory of assimilation. And so their concerns will be the concerns of a wonderful, better word, average Americans in the political system. So there's nothing unique that I think one would be able to trace through the fact of Indian American involvement in politics. And I say this because there's an interesting reference point for comparison, which is if you were to compare them say to the Jewish American community, would you see any substantial difference? And I would wager that Indian Americans would just become highly normalized. They'd just become like, you know, regular American who assimilates into the system. Except I think really there'd be much more running for political office. Already it's way off the charts. Yes. But with nothing. But between the mainstream. Absolutely. Absolutely. But running for office is, I think it's just tip of the iceberg. It's a lot coming from. I want to thank the authors not only for coming, but for producing a really terrific book. I want to thank Ashley and Sonal for their comments. I want to invite all of you to join us downstairs for a little reception. I say this all the time, don't stop and talk to your neighbor up here. Go downstairs, have a drink. Talk to them down there. It's free, I promise. The book is not free. The book you have to pay for. And you can get it signed. But please join me in giving all of our panelists a round of applause. Thank you.