But the meeting displayed how the anger over the visa program has helped ignite racist rhetoric targeting the Indian community, not only in Frisco, but across the country.
Created in 1990, the H-1B program allows up to 85,000 foreign workers to fill specialized roles in the United States every year. In 2023, around three-quarters of the 400,000 or so approved H-1B applications were for workers from India, according to
Pew Research Center. That same year, Dallas-Ft. Worth ranked
fourth among metropolitan areas for approved H-1B applications. Many of these visa holders work as software programmers and computer engineers.
Rules around the H-1B visa are meant to protect American workers. Companies, for instance, are prohibited from paying H-1B workers less than other workers with similar skills and qualifications. But the effectiveness of these rules is hotly disputed.
...
The
important policy debates about H-1B visas, however, have been increasingly overshadowed by what Asian American advocacy groups say is a surge in hate speech directed at South Asians. Between January 2023 and December 2025, the use of anti-South Asian slurs in online spaces associated with targeted violence rose by 115 percent, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit that tracks discrimination against Asian Americans.
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a nonprofit that tracks online extremism,
found a similar uptick against Indians, noting that posts on X featuring anti-Indian slurs, stereotypes or narratives like “deport Indians” garnered 280 million views over about two months last summer.
In recent months, prominent conservatives of Indian heritage like
Vivek Ramaswamy and Dinesh D’Souza have also
decried a rise in such rhetoric.
“In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric,” Mr. D’Souza
wrote on X. “The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation? It’s a question worth thinking about.”
Some of the racist rhetoric echoes
the great replacement conspiracy theory, which tries to stoke fear of a future in which white people are no longer the majority in America.
“Whereas the old version of replacement theory accuses Jews of taking over, the thrust of this new version is that now Indian people are taking over,” said Stephanie Chan, director of data and research at Stop AAPI Hate, which works together with Moonshot, a company that tracks extremism online...
