There is one form of discrimination that remains "legal" in this country: caste discrimination

The Mercury News is reporting another H-1B visa scam, this time by a Chinese national named Weiyun Huang, who graduated with a degree in finance and accounting from the University of Mississippi, and set about using it to help “more than 2,500 Chinese nationals that she helped improperly apply to extend their stays in the U.S.” and “was a purported spy for the Chinese government, federal authorities have alleged in court documents.” For a price, of course: “Authorities alleged Huang brought in at least $1.5 million through a scam involving H-1B visas and student work permits in which she used a Mountain View address to provide fake documents claiming foreign citizens were employed by her companies so they could stay in the U.S. Her credit card records showed ‘significant’ spending at luxury retailers.” Like many of the “favored” foreign workers, Huang was not herself “working” in the country on an H-1B visa, but on an H-4 visa, which allows the spouses of H-1B visas holders to also work in the country; there is an estimated 100,000 H-4 visa holders, mostly Indian women, who are not generally counted in the “official” tallies of foreign workers in the country. 

A recent attempt to put a number on the actual number of people working on H-1B visas in the country today shows how immigration services have lost control of the program, with “at best” estimates of something around 600,000 who can be “verified” despite so-called yearly “caps.” The News reports that the Citizenship and Immigration service has no electronic data system tracking this information, and the exact number, according to Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute, is “anybody’s guess.” As pointed out, the spouses of H-1B visa holders are not part of those counts, and from one person whose comments I posted, few H-1B visa holders actually go “home” when their 6-years visas are expired (contrary to the sob-stories the H-1B supporting Forbes keeps putting out), and through various scams at least 1 million people—the majority from India—are in the country illegally on expired visas. The same individual (an Indian-American who said he has “inside” knowledge)  noted that Indian IT consulting firms have a hiring “monopoly,” almost never make a sincere effort to hire American citizens,  and don’t report to the government that they have employees whose visas have expired. 

Now, I have talked about this all before, but I think it is important to note that American ideals are being harmed by all of this. Chinese nationals come to this country not because they want to “learn” about American democratic principles, but to exploit them for the benefit of the “home” country—which appears to have surpassed Russia as the U.S.’ biggest potential foe on the world stage, and yet U.S. companies are willingly importing de facto espionage, the theft of “trade secrets” and the undermining of the U.S. economy for the sake of cutting a few costs and corners.

But Indians—not all, but certainly the majority—are bringing something into the country that most Americans are completely oblivious to: the caste system that not only affects the lives of Indians whose identities are defined by their particular “caste,” but also their interactions with the “natives.” Most white people would not notice this because it is difficult for them to accept that a distinctly foreign group could come to this country and simply “takeover”—like say, “customer service” call centers, motels and convenience stores. It is amazing how in such a relatively short time whole sectors of the U.S. economy has been taken over by a group whose single-minded devotion to its “peculiar” social system has overtaken the so-called American “ideal” of equality opportunity for all, and flaunting anti-discrimination laws. 

According to the website thelogicalindian.com, those who did even merit being in a caste were those who did “menial jobs as sweepers, gutter cleaners, scavengers, watchmen, farm laborers, rearers of unclean animals such as pigs, and curers of hides.” Unless you are a neo-Nazi, a white supremacist or Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, no American who does such work regards themselves as being an “untouchable” or even a member of a “caste.” But what are “high-caste” Indians thinking? At least in India, high-caste Indians actually demand that lower-caste Indians not walk too close behind them, because they might “pollute” their shadow. Yeah, they actually believe that. 

The Pulitzer Center website has published articles on caste prejudice that follows Indians who abide by—or are forced to abide by—its strictures right here in this country. It isn’t just Dalits—the so-called “untouchables”—who are generally shunned by other castes because they are so low that they do not even have a “caste” to identify them as having a useful purpose in Indian society are most affected by this “system,” but it is still socially unacceptable for a higher caste person to marry a member of another caste that is more than one notch beneath them, especially for a man. Whether or not this actually changes with succeeding generations born in this country is yet to be seen. White Americans, of course, would be offended if Indians in this country would regard them as being in an “inferior” caste in their own country, although that hasn’t stopped many Indian managers of companies to regard them as being of “inferior” quality, thus the proliferation of H-1B visa requests in this country. How they regard people who are not white or Indian obviously is much aided by the prevailing stereotypes and prejudices that already in place in this country 

A 2018 survey by Equality Labs, “Caste in the United States” revealed that lower caste and non-caste Indians—the Adivasis, who are the “indigenous” peoples of India, and Dalits—are no matter what their economic or educational position is in this country, essentially handcuffed within the Indian community by the social mores of the “home country” that are   defined by the Hindu religion. Dalits who attempt to escape the religion-defined social mores by converting to Buddhism or Christianity still find that their status is unchanged within the larger Indian community. Many lower caste Indians avoid using their surnames, since those names denote a person’s caste, and within social and work environments that name can limit one’s ability to achieve, even in this country where the concept of “caste” has no legal definition.  And therein lies the problem: the U.S. recognizes many forms of discrimination—race, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical disability—but not caste discrimination. In 2017, a Manhattan Indian restaurant called Sahib was sued by a Dalit waiter, but his legal suit was refused standing because there was no law against caste discrimination. 

Kevin Brown, a professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, observed that “The United States doesn't recognize the concept of caste, so it's not included in any of our laws that prohibit discrimination. We in the U.S. just haven't had as much experience with problems within the Indian communities that moved to the United States. So our legal system hasn't caught up to that. Unfortunately then, there are very little protections for Dalits in the United States for the discrimination that they encounter here with caste Hindus.” 

This discrimination is often based not just on simple “caste,” but on skin color and race as well; caste discrimination isn’t just pernicious for those within the Indian community, but for Americans who are not “white.” Many Indians regard themselves as “Aryan” and thus “Caucasian.” In the U.S. Supreme Court case The United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Thind—an Indian Sikh—claimed he was a "high caste Aryan, of full Indian blood" and asserted his was white and should be allowed get U.S. citizenship at a time when only white immigrants (because of the 1917 immigration law) could legally become citizens. The justices unanimously denied that he was “white” or could be naturalized. It is thus highly ironic that the civil rights laws of the 1960s ended-up being enormously beneficial not just for white women, but for “high-caste” Indians who chaffed at the idea that they should not be treated just like any white person in this country—yet within their own community continue to practice a rock-solid form of discrimination. 

How rock solid? In 2018, the UK government attempted to pass a law banning caste discrimination, but decided to back down after widespread denunciations by Hindu groups bent on preserving their “privilege” to discriminate against others, even non-Indians. This is not to say that there are no liberal-minded upper caste Indians who oppose the caste system, and Gandhi not only opposed it, but it was the motivation behind his assassination. We are already seeing the effects of this kind of discrimination against American citizens in many areas of the economy; the question is with so many tech companies, particularly those with Indian managers, demanding more and more visas and green cards, and with an ever increasing “hidden” population that continues to occupy the country illegally without any oversight by immigration authorities, just how far down the caste totem pole do Americans want to go before someone decides that discrimination in any of its forms is illegal in this country?