Prominent Hindu Indian-American declares support for Republican Party

While I do not support Donald Trump's candidacy for President, I nevertheless applaud the remarks made by Shalabh Kumar, chairman of the Republican Hindu Coalition, in his statement in support of Trump and other Republican candidates in 2016.

I have written in the past (for example, here) that the Republican Party, and not the Democratic party, is the natural home of Hindu immigrants from India and other immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.

Everywhere you look in Silicon Valley, you see Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European (ICEE) immigrants helping to build the high-tech economy. All are here as legal immigrants and many have become American citizens. The education level, technical and engineering skills, and earning power in these populations is significantly higher than what is found in other ethnic communities. Since these ICEE immigrants mostly work in high-tech companies with well-defined HR procedures, they are not paid in cash under the table, like many illegal aliens are, and therefore pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes. My guess is that they also make much less use of social services than illegal aliens do. As a group, they generally place a very high value on education, so that the school districts where ICEE immigrant families preponderate often have outstanding public schools, with little gang activity. (Think of Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, California, or Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California, where Asian students make up approximately 85% of students and which are among the best public high schools in California. As a result, property values in the attendance areas of those schools are sky high.) All the software companies I have ever worked for in Silicon Valley have always drawn and continue to draw extensively on this pool of ICEE immigrants and they often form the backbone of software development teams throughout the Valley.

In my opinion, ICEE immigrants are natural constituents of the Republican Party. My experience is that they have conservative family values. They believe that one should get ahead through hard work, not government handouts. They understand the financial mess the US finds itself in and find it repugnant. Their value system is decidedly entrepreneurial and meritocratic. Statements like President Obama's "You didn't build that" are counterintuitive to them.

Having observed firsthand the distinctive characteristics of ICEE immigrants and citizens here in Silicon Valley and having concluded that the natural home for them is the Republican Party, I was very pleased to read Mr Kumar's statements confirming my observations. Of the Hindu Indian-American community in the United States, he writes:

We as a people, and I as businessman, believe that both material and spiritual human prosperity come from a system in which individuals are free to pursue their dreams and aspirations, where private enterprise creates economic expansion and jobs, and where government involvement in the lives of the citizenry is limited. Human development comes from individuals, families and communities, and not from government, which only spends taxpayers’ money without much regard for its value.

Some four million Hindus reside in the United States. As a group, we have a higher per capita income than any other group. We also have the highest average education levels, the highest proportion of people employed as managers, the highest number of entrepreneurs (one in seven), the largest donations to charity, and are the least dependent on government. Self-sufficiency is a given in our community, and we don’t spend more than we earn. Hindu-Americans pay almost $50 billion per year in taxes, and we expect the government to be as judicious with its income as we are as individuals.

In recognizing the vibrancy of the Indian-American community, we must acknowledge one factor in our success: education. Although there are many problems with the public education system in this country, lack of access for minorities is not one. The access is there. Most Indian- Americans grow up attending urban public schools. Why is it, then, that Indian-Americans succeed in the very schools that others do not?

It is the ethos of our culture. We eagerly take advantage of opportunities when they are presented. To us, this is a civic duty, and we as a people have a responsibility to the nation that has afforded us so many opportunities to better ourselves. This obligation is represented in the Republican Party platform, while the Democratic Party platform focuses on ethnic victimhood.

The Republican Party needs to do much more outreach to the Hindu Indian-American community and to Chinese and Eastern European immigrants, the ICEE communities, in particular, here in Silicon Valley. These groups have the potential to form an important bloc in conservative politics in the United States in the coming years.

Obama's inflammatory rhetoric

Speaking on the situation in New Orleans, President Obama said: ""We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda."

Can you believe the obtuseness of this our supposedly most intelligent president ever? After fanning the flames of racial division for months with his own inflammatory rhetoric about systemic racism in police departments across America, after endlessly trying to advance his own agenda and score political points by throwing around careless accusations, Obama has the temerity to admonish others to show restraint.

If there is violence at the Republican Convention starting today, it will be on Obama's head.

Visigoth and Syrian refugees and other thoughts about walls

I've been reading The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians by the eminent Roman, Byzantine, and early medieval historian J.B. Bury, published in 1928. Maybe Obama and Merkel should read a little ancient history. They would discover that, when wars spring up in the East, are allowed to blaze out of control, and send waves of foreign refugees flooding into Europe, serious consequences, including the downfalls of great empires, can ensue.

The [Visigoths] were seized by panic and firmly believed that there was no safety for them [from the invading Huns] north of the Danube. They determined to withdraw southward beyond that river and seek the shelter of the Roman Empire. This was a very critical decision: it led to events which determined the course of the history of the Roman Empire. Accordingly they sent an ambassador to the Emperor Valens, who was then staying at Antioch, beseeching him to allow the nation to cross the river and grant them lands in the provinces of the Balkan peninsula. It was the year 376. In the meantime their families abandoned their homes and encamped along the shores of the lower Danube, ready to cross the moment the Romans permitted them. The situation was highly embarrassing for the Emperor and his government. It was unique: they had no experience to guide them in dealing with it. It was pressing; some decision must be come to immediately; there was no time for ripe deliberation. The opinion of ministers and councillors was naturally divided, but it was finally decided to accede to the request of the Goths and to receive them as new subjects on Roman soil. The decision was reached with much hesitation and only after many searchings of heart; but we may be certain that the Emperor and his advisers did not in the least realise or imagine the difficulties of the task to which their consent committed them. To settle peacefully within their borders a nation of perhaps 80,000 or more barbarians was a problem which could be solved only by most careful organisation requiring long preparation. In recent times Europe has had some experience of the enormous difficulties of dealing with crowds of refugees, and of the elaborate organisation which is necessary. Take, for instance, the case of the thousands of Asiatic Greeks who fled from the Turks and sought refuge in European Greece. [Bury refers here to the expulsion of Anatolian Greeks from the Turkish mainland that took place, roughly, in the years 1914 to 1922.] Here it was simply a case of affording food and shelter to people of the same race, but it taxed the whole resources of the Greek Government to solve it. The problem that met Valens was vastly different and more difficult. Quite suddenly, without any time for thinking out the problem or for any preparation, he was called on to admit into his dominions a foreign nation, of barbarous habits, armed and warlike, conscious of their national unity: to provide them with food, and to find them habitations. The Roman state was highly organised, but naturally there was no organisation to deal with an abnormal demand of this kind, which could not have been anticipated. As might have been expected, when the barbarians crossed the river and encamped in Lower Moesia (Bulgaria) all kinds of difficulties and deplorable incidents occurred. The military and civil officials were quite unequal to coping with the situation, and no wonder. War was the result, a war lasting nearly two years and culminating in A.D. 378 in the great battle of Hadrianople, which is one of the landmarks of history.

Bury, J. B.. The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians (Kindle Locations 575-597). Albion Press. Kindle Edition.

As Wikipedia observes, the battle of Hadrianople "is often considered the start of the process which led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century."

The scenes are all too familiar. Visigoth refugees huddle on the northern banks of the Danube, fleeing the onslaught of the Huns behind them and longing to reach the opposite southern shore, controlled by the "humane" Romans. In our own day, Syrian refugees huddle on the shores of the Mediterranean in Turkey, fleeing the onslaught of ISIS behind them and longing to reach a Greek island or the European mainland across the water. Officials are confused about what to do. Should the refugees be admitted? Their plight is heart-wrenching. But in language, culture, and religion they are vastly different from the local residents who will be forced to take them in. Also, they come from a place where warfare is a way of life and they are habituated to the ways of violence. Finally, the decision is made to admit them. They flood in. "All kinds of difficulties and deplorable incidents" ensue. Eventually, the refugees become alienated from their hosts and turn against them (as we have seen in France, in its capital Paris and just yesterday in Nice). An act of humanitarianism on behalf of the refugees ends up undermining the stability of the very government that welcomed the refugees in.

This is by no means an argument in favor of not taking refugees in. Rather, it is simply a statement of how complicated the situation can become and how unintended consequences can result from the best of intentions. One is forced at least to acknowledge that, when one reflects on the fact that the Roman emperors could have continued to use the Danube as a barrier to keep the Visigoths out, thereby possibly preserving their Empire, that the Roman emperor Hadrian constructed the wall named after him to separate Romans from barbarians in Northern England, and that the Chinese constructed the Great Wall to stem the raids and invasions of the various nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe, maybe Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall or other kind of barrier across our southern border to prevent illegal Mexican migrants from flooding into our nation doesn't sound so hare-brained after all.