It seems that scarcely a week goes by without Indian Americans becoming targets of abuse. Whether they are attending a football game or building a temple, their place in the US is under increasingly hostile scrutiny. A recent Carnegie report, Indian Americans in a Time of Turbulence, found that, since the start of 2025, nearly half of those polled had frequently encountered racist social-media posts. Some of this harassment no doubt originates from outside the US.

But the animus clearly has a domestic base too. Snide remarks about Usha Vance’s family or Vivek Ramaswamy’s faith imply that, no matter their accomplishments, they are not truly American. What to make of such claims?

It is a mistake to brush aside nativism with the retort that America is a “nation of immigrants”. As Samuel Huntington pointedly observed in Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), America was founded not by immigrants entering an established society but by settlers creating a new one.

These settlers were predominantly white, English, and Protestant. They fashioned a distinctive Anglo-American political culture that emphasised constitutional government, religious faith and liberty, private enterprise, and individual responsibility.

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Without the exertions of these “western sons of liberty”, as John Jay called them in The Federalist Papers, the US as we know it would not exist. Those who describe themselves as “heritage Americans” seek to underline this point. The term resonates because there is an elemental truth to it.

But the story does not end there. Successive generations that built America also believed that, in Thomas Paine’s words, America could be an “asylum for mankind.” They quarrelled over which immigrants to accept and in what numbers, fitfully........

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