The TOI correspondent from Washington: The photograph that Bo French chose to make a political argument about Indians and foreigners overrunning the University of Texas, Austin, may have been worth thousands of social media posts, but it failed the statistical smell test.French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, posted a photograph of Longhorn fans — named after the famous local cattle breed — celebrating UT Austin’s dramatic September 12 football victory over Ohio State. Because a section of the crowd appeared heavily brown — itself surprising because cricket-mad Indians are no great fans of American football — French presented it as visual evidence of a demographic desi takeover.“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he wrote. He later doubled down, saying the image showed how “Americans have been displaced by foreigners” and lamenting that Texas families could not get their children into UT because the university “prioritizes foreigners over Texans.”There was, however, a small problem with the argument: UT’s enrollment figures do not remotely resemble the photograph. For 2025-26, UT Austin reported 55,000 students, of whom 80.5% were Texas residents. Another 10.2% came from elsewhere in the U.S. International students accounted for about 6,877 students, and of those, 1,660 were from India, roughly 2.4% of total university enrollment — a substantial community, but hardly evidence of a foreign or Indian invasion.There is another important statistical trap in the “Indians/foreigners have taken over” canard: “Asian” or “Indian” or “brown” is not synonymous with “foreign.” A foreign-looking student in a football crowd could be an American citizen, a permanent resident, a Texas-born child of immigrants or an international student. Race or apparent ethnicity cannot establish immigration status. The photo says rather more about Texas’s changing demographics than about foreigners taking over UT.Asian Americans now constitute about 6.7% of Texas’s population, while the state’s foreign-born population is 17.6%, according to Census Bureau data. The transformation is particularly visible in the technology and professional suburbs around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Austin which have become a hotbed of anti-Indian rhetoric and activism.Indian community activists acknowledge none of this means immigration policy is beyond legitimate debate, nor that every criticism of the H-1B programme is xenophobic. They agree that critics raise genuine questions about outsourcing, wage competition, employer practices, visa dependence and whether the programme is being used as Congress intended. But there is a considerable difference between asking whether H-1B policy works properly and looking at a football crowd, guessing people’s ethnicity and declaring that Indians are displacing Americans.The distinction matters because Indians have increasingly become a conspicuous target in America’s immigration debate. The H-1B program is heavily concentrated among Indian nationals, particularly in technology and other skilled occupations. As the visa debate has intensified, legitimate arguments about the program have increasingly merged online with claims, accompanied by ugly racial slurs and stereotyping, that Indians — “jeets” in MAGA argot — are “invaders” and “job stealers.”A Center for the Study of Organized Hate analysis of 680 high-engagement anti-Indian posts on X between July 1 and September 7, 2025, found that they generated 281 million views. Nearly 70% involved narratives about Indians as “invaders” or “job thieves,” alongside calls for deportation. French’s UT post fits into that pattern: foreign status inferred from appearance, and appearance presented as evidence of institutional capture.The response from Texas Republicans exposed another fault line within the GOP. Senator John Cornyn, a Republican and former co-chair of the Senate India Caucus, sharply rebuked French, asking whether Republicans would condemn “intolerance and racism” or allow it to become normalized.“This is how great political parties self-destruct,” he warned. French, rather than retreating, attacked Cornyn as an “America Last” globalist and accused institutions of being overrun by illegal aliens and foreign nationals.The exchanges illustrate a larger Republican dilemma.Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has made two business trips to India, has simultaneously pursued tough state-level immigration measures while maintaining a political and economic environment attractive to technology, energy and internationally connected businesses. In response to the controversy, Abbott rejected French’s interpretation of the photograph, saying it showed how Texans could unite, while reiterating his support for stringent immigration policies and restrictions involving H-1B visas at universities. MAGA hardliner response: A meme showing Abbott smooching a sari clad woman who says, “Thank you for catering to us.”French’s history makes the episode more combustible. He has previously made inflammatory comments about Muslims and Jews, advocated sweeping deportations and used provocative language about immigrants and Native Americans. In March, he called for deporting 100 million people — a figure that would corral almost a third of the U.S population and would necessarily encompass millions of American citizens.The political question now is whether Texas Republicans will continue treating visible demographic change as evidence of displacement or distinguish between immigration policy, economic competition and the much older question of who gets to call himself or herself a Texan – or American for that matter. For now, a football photograph has exposed a much deeper argument over immigration, race, economic opportunity and the changing meaning of “American” — while the statistics sit rather conspicuously on the sidelines.
