Trump in 2025: A view from the hyphen

India welcomed Trump’s victory in November 2024, as Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar made clear long, long ago, as it seems.  For Indian-Americans like me, it was less enthusiasm, more pragmatism: what will actually get better – starting with inflation and basic social order in my community around mid-town Manhattan?  Like many Americans, I was tired of the sense that government had turned into theatre: big speeches and symbolic gestures. The migrant shelters in midtown Manhattan (one of the most expensive patches of real-estate in the world), occupied rooms in five-star hotels like the Roosevelt.  It felt like political drama dressed up as compassion when the less expensive outer boroughs were strewn with empty buildings and we could have compassionately housed more migrants, not less. Trump 2025 Indian-American community

And yes, parts of that spectacle did change in January. The posture shifted from “we are flailing” to “we are enforcing” but as the year unfolded, the tradeoff felt brutal: the optics of disorder gave way to the optics of force. What replaced one kind of dysfunction was not calm competence – but street-level fear: raids, kidnappings, and a growing sense that masked federal agents could do anything, and take anyone, including US citizens. The NYC Bar Association and Center for American Progress criticised ICE’s practice of wearing masks during detentions and arrests.  In Chicago, student journalists have started mapping sightings of immigration agents amidst panic and allegations of aggressive and unlawful tactics.

That said, the core promise – lower inflation and social discipline has not shown up in the way ordinary people experience daily life. Even where inflation metrics cooled, previous price rises and the failure of wages to keep up means that the affordability argument refuses to die. Inflation may slow slightly while the affordability debate continues to rage – a distinction anyone buying groceries already understands. Clearly, 2.4% inflation is not the same as “prices went back down”, or that “my salary has gone up”. Additionally, tariffs became part of the cost-of-living argument, with economists warning that they are an additional tax. Trump policies Indian Americans

So these are not Indian issues but American issues:  Trump’s approval on handling the economy is at 31%, his lowest point on that issue.  Worse, even his immigration approval has fallen! No one supports Gestapo-style wanton cruelty. Hispanics, 48% of whom supported Trump in November 2024, have now pulled back to 34% – and dropping (see table below, primarily summarised from Pew polling, but also others).

The charts dramatically show how the 2024 spikes have retraced themselves.  Indian-Americans are still too few to matter electorally but anecdotal evidence indicates that they generally mirror the Asian-American trend:

Living on the hyphen

What makes this year especially unsettling – especially from the perspective of someone living on the hyphen, Indian-American – is the way politics around immigrants has become both more transactional. 2025 showed how quickly electoral gains can curdle into distrust when governance turns punitive.  This is a measure of lived anxiety, when citizens (like me) start carrying our passports, and non-citizens fear deportation over trivia.

At a governmental level, the “cost” of the crackdown feels personal even when we are not the headline. We had hoped for closer India-US relations. What we got was India being punished for Russia’s sins, as a function of tariff leverage. This is an economic and diplomatic pressure point that inevitably spills into the broader bilateral tone.

Then there’s the knife-edge issue for so many Indian families: H-1B visas – for those who still have them. New visas themselves have been virtually shut down by the $100,000 fee.  Additionally, expanded social media screenings have begun.  Worst of all – the broad numbers are tiny: about 50,000 a year.  Stopping them does nothing to address the larger issue of the millions of illegals but pauses careers, splits families and sends a message: your stability is always conditional.  Fortunately, several other countries now welcome H1Bs from the US.

So where does that leave me, at year’s end? I do not feel personally responsible:  I voted for a candidate I did not particularly care for – Kamala Harris, and campaigned for her.  The only reason?  I believed that the right to abortion being curtailed for half the population was undemocratic and could not be countenanced.

What I do feel now is clarity: the US is swinging from performative permissiveness to real harshness without landing on competent governance. We wanted lower inflation and social discipline – we got neither.

To my fellow Americans, I would say:  we must refuse the false choice between chaos and cruelty. If America can’t offer both dignity and order, then the hyphen will remain an anxious place for immigrants today – and all Americans tomorrow. Trump 2025 Indian-American community

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