It was 1958, seven years before a new law would transform the American immigration system and fundamentally change the face of the nation.
Harris is the daughter of immigrants – her mother from India and her father from Jamaica. Har vice presidency nomination marks a milestone and marks a major demographic shift in the U.S. in recent decades as more immigrants began arriving from non-European countries.
“It’s very important. … It’s in the first instance really confirming and rooting in our consciousness that these demographic shifts are a whole lot of our country and they are here to stay,” said Senator Ghazala Hashmi, Virginia was born in India.
“Their background, their experience, their leadership is an indication of the ways in which so many immigrant communities are simply being woven into the fabric of this country.”
Some Native Americans say the moment is a particularly resonant sign of how far the community has come in a matter of decades. Others note that Harris’ Indian heritage is only one part of her background and caution against painting a group that is culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse with too broad a brush.
But there is no doubt that this is a “first” that attracts attention.
Dhingra says that reveals a lot about how American immigration policies affect who can come to the US in the first place, and what happens to generations of families once they are here.
The US began to allow more Asians and Africans
“It speaks to how American immigration law privileged certain types of immigrants, namely those with high levels of education and skills in scientific fields, that many Indians, including Kamala Harris’ mother, migrated through,” Dhingra says. “Once you have a population in the U.S. that is highly educated and highly skilled, it prepares their children for certain kinds of accomplishments and opportunities that can happen within a generation or two.”
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated quotas for national origin, paved the way for millions of Indians and other non-European immigrants to come to the United States.
“It fundamentally changed the demographics of the country. It made the country … more Asian and African,” says Dhingra, “although that was not his intention.”
In the 1940s and 1950s, the number of Native American immigrants in the United States fell so sharply that they did not even register in official Census tallies, says Devesh Kapur, director of Asian programs and a professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins School for advanced international studies.
In 1960, two years after Harris’ mother arrived in California to begin her doctoral studies, there were about 12,000 Native American immigrants in the United States. By 2018, the last census estimate was available, there were nearly 2.7 million.
“Every decade since 1980, it’s almost doubled,” Kapur says.
How Harris defines her heritage
When asked last year how she defines herself, given her Indian roots, Harris replied, “Proud American.”
How Native American Americans Vote
Will Harris on the ticket influence how Indian Americans vote?
That’s hard to say, says Kapur, who says he plans to conduct a survey of Native American voters to get a better sense of how they feel about Harris’ candidacy and other election problems. .
“We do not know. … There are so many factors. People are already so polarized in these elections. … We know that in this election many more of the voters have already made their sense,” says Kapur.
But some Native American Americans supported Trump in 2016. And several prominent Native American politicians are Republicans, including former UN Ambassador and Gov. South Carolina Nikki Haley and former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Whatever happens at the polls, seeing Harris on the ticket is likely to inspire a new generation to consider careers in politics, says Sanjay Puri, chairman of the US-India Political Action Committee. Already, he says, a growing number of Indian-Americans are running for office.
“It will open up the floods. … This is going to be a seminal moment. You might see this, 10 years, 20 years from now, where there will be young people, people who are more and more into it. public life comes because of this, “he says.
“Not just Native Americans, but I think everywhere, the opportunities are there for people … regardless of how their name is pronounced, or whatever the background to it. I think it serves as a great inspiring story.”
‘An American name’
Harris’ first name, Kamala, comes from the Sanskrit word for “lotus flower.”
Kapur, of Johns Hopkins, says it was not a detail he focused on when the Biden campaign announced it would be on the ticket.
“For me,” he says, “what is important are the greater attributes of this individual, rather than the Indian part.” But he says his daughter, who recently graduated from college, had a different reaction: “It’s nice to have someone with a name that plays me, that I recognize.”
“It’s symbolic, yes,” Kapur says. “But symbolism should not be seen as irrelevant.”
Hashmi, the Virginia state senator who fired a staunch Republican last year, knows how important names can be. She was four years old when she immigrated to India from India in 1969, growing up in a small town in Georgia, where for years was the only South Asian family in the city.
The tagline she uses in her 2019 campaign: “Ghazala Hashmi is an American name.”
It was in part an attempt to reach out to voters from immigrant backgrounds who were not accustomed to seeing themselves represented in political leaders. But Hashmi says the line also had a broader appeal.
“People, no matter where they came from or who they were or their demographics, that seems to be a message that they really understood,” she says. “America was changing. The face of America is changing. … I could just see the impact on people’s faces. It became a message that really resonated.”
At the campaign trial, she says, mothers would tell her that her little girls adjusted the tagline, and put their names in front of them.
CNN’s Joshua Berlinger, Vedika Sud and Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.
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