We had some fun yesterday goofing on t.u. and terrible Texan politicians at the expense of the Indian desi diaspora, didn’t we? Let’s get serious. Indian-Americans of previous generations earned their places the hard way: they came as professionals or the children of professionals, learned the country, and became part of it. They’d have been welcome even under the old Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917. The current concern is not “Indians exist.” It’s that a sudden, very large, poorly selected wave is obliterating the reputation the earlier waves built, and that a nativist backlash, if it comes, will not carefully distinguish third-generation Texans of South Asian descent from last year’s H-1B cohort. To my Indian-American friends, I’d ask you to consider the following. First, assimilation is not optional. People who immigrate to America should dress, speak, and live like Americans. Many recent arrivals do not, and they are arriving in concentrated numbers, all at once. No high-trust country - Texas, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Australia - can absorb a rapid influx of culturally distant migrants without consequences. It isn’t a neutral event. Housing tightens. Local labor markets shift. Social trust falls. Accusing natives of bigotry for noticing this is how you get much uglier politics later. Second, public religious display is not the same as a household shrine. The United States protects private worship. It does not promise indifference to 90-foot idols or temple complexes built as civilizational statements in a still-majority Christian country. You can cite “freedom of religion.” Locals will still take it as a cultural statement on public space and react accordingly. Third, social media ended the courtesy of not knowing about the sending culture. What people now see of “India” is not a few professionals in Houston. It’s mountains of garbage, a “holy river” used as a sewer, national “Poo in the Loo” campaigns because public defecation is common enough to require one, and eating slop off the floor with fingers. You can call that prejudice. You can also admit that hygiene and public order are part of why *you left*, and part of why Americans do not want the same norms imported at scale. Fourth, the old stereotype of the high-skill South Asian professional is being replaced, in real time, by a mass labor-import story: call centers, IT shops, retail, student visas used as work permits. Firms are not doing this out of cosmopolitan virtue. They’re doing it because the labor is cheaper and more compliant. Every slot filled that way is a slot an American kid, whose family paid for the university and the roads, did not get. Skill-based immigration is defensible. Labor arbitrage dressed up as “talent” is not. Fifth, norms travel with people. The earlier desi cohort largely adopted Western expectations around merit, contracts, and honesty. The operating system showing up now - izzat, jugaad, nepotistic family networks, visa mills, title and lending scams - is visible because social media and local experience made it visible. High-trust societies are rare. They do not survive if newcomers treat rules as obstacles to be gamed. A solution doesn’t require hating a whole ethnicity or rounding up subcontinentals. It requires conceding that numbers, selection, and speed decide whether immigration is a societal gain or a political time bomb. The people with the most to lose from a crude purge are the ones who already assimilated. They should be the *first and loudest* to demand that these latest waves of co-ethnics meet the standard they met​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​, fairly, or go back home.