[26] Emigration from India was driven by difficulties facing Indian farmers, including the challenges posed by the colonial land tenure system for small landowners, and by drought and food shortages, which worsened in the 1890s.

At the same time, Canadian steamship companies, acting on behalf of Pacific coast employers, recruited Sikh farmers with economic opportunities in British Columbia.

[26] Escaping from racist attacks in Canada, Sikhs migrated to Pacific Coast U.S. states in the 1900s to work in the lumber mills of Bellingham and Everett, Washington.

[29] Some white Americans, resentful of economic competition and the arrival of people from different cultures, responded to Sikh immigration with racism and violent attacks.

While anti-Asian racism was embedded in U.S. politics and culture in the early 20th century, Indians were also racialized for their anticolonialism, with U.S. officials, who pushed for Western imperial expansion abroad, casting them as a "Hindu" menace.

In 1910, judge Emile Henry Lacombe of the Southern District of New York gave Balsara citizenship on the hope that the United States attorney would indeed challenge his decision and appeal it to create "an authoritative interpretation" of the law.

[36] These decisions contrasted with the 1907 declaration by U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte: "...under no construction of the law can natives of British India be regarded as white persons.

[41] Furthermore, the court ruled that based on popular understanding of race, the term "white person" referred to people of northern or western European ancestry rather than "Caucasians" in the most technical sense.

He became a biochemist at Harvard University, and he "discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as an energy source in cells, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer."

Gobind Behari Lal, who went to the University of California, Berkeley in 1912, became the science editor of the San Francisco Examiner and was the first Indian American to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

It also allowed Indian immigrants to naturalize and become citizens of the U.S., effectively reversing the Supreme Court's 1923 ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind.

In the 1940s, the prices of the land increased, and the Bracero program brought thousands of Mexican guest workers to work on farms, which helped shift second-generation Indian American farmers into "commercial, nonagricultural occupations, from running small shops and grocery stores, to operating taxi services and becoming engineers."

The emergence of Information Technology industry in Indian cities as Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, and Hyderabad led to the large number of migrations to the U.S. primarily from the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu in South India.

Affluent professionals and senior citizens, a temperate climate with numerous greenbelts, charitable benefactors to COVID relief efforts in India in official coordination with Monroe Township, Hindu mandirs, Indian food trucks and language classes, and Bollywood actors with second homes all play into the growth of the Indian population in the township, as well as its relative proximity to top-ranked Princeton University.

[98] The percentage of Silicon Valley startups founded by Indian immigrants has increased from 7% in 1999 to 15.5% in 2006, as reported in the 1999 study by AnnaLee Saxenian[99] and her updated work in 2006 in collaboration with Vivek Wadhwa.

[100] Indian Americans have risen to top positions at many major companies (e.g., IBM, PepsiCo, MasterCard, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe, Softbank, Cognizant, Sun Microsystems.)

[102] Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, in his 2005 book The World Is Flat, explains this trend in terms of brain drain, whereby a sample of the best and brightest people in India emigrate to the United States in order to seek better financial opportunities.

[citation needed] Hasan Minhaj, Fareed Zakaria, Aziz Ansari,[119] and Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan[120] are few well-known Indian American Muslims.

[134] Momentum has been growing to recognize the Dharmic holy day Deepavali (Diwali) as a holiday on school district calendars in the New York City metropolitan area.

In 2012, the film Not a Feather, but a Dot directed by Teju Prasad, was released which investigates the history, perceptions and changes in the Indian American community over the last century.

In popular media, several Indian American personalities have made their mark in recent years, including Ashok Amritraj, M. Night Shyamalan, Kovid Gupta, Kal Penn, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Padma Lakshmi, Hari Kondabolu, Karan Brar, Aziz Ansari, Hasan Minhaj, Poorna Jagannathan and Mindy Kaling.

According to the website of Baruch College of the City University of New York, "The FIA, which came into being in 1970 is an umbrella organization meant to represent the diverse Indian population of NYC.

The world's largest Sikh Day Parade outside India celebrating Vaisakhi and the season of renewal is held in Manhattan annually in April.

[201] The police arrested a woman, Erika Menendez, who admitted to the act and justified it, stating that she shoved him onto the tracks because she believed he was "a Hindu or a Muslim" and she wanted to retaliate for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

[205][206][207] On August 11, 2006, Senator George Allen allegedly referred to an opponent's political staffer of Indian ancestry as "macaca" and commenting, "Welcome to America, to the real world of Virginia."

On February 22, 2017, recent immigrants Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani were shot at a bar in Olathe, Kansas by Adam Purinton, a white American who mistook them for persons of Middle Eastern descent, yelling "get out of my country" and "terrorist."

[213] In December, 2015, over 30 Indian students seeking admission in two U.S. universities—Silicon Valley University and the Northwestern Polytechnic University—were denied entry by Customs and Border Protection and were deported to India.

Arranged marriages and relationships can take many different forms, and that the experiences of those involved can vary greatly depending on a variety of circumstances, including cultural background, familial values, and individual preferences.

[229] Polls before the 2004 presidential election showed Indian Americans favoring Democratic candidate John Kerry over Republican George W. Bush by a 53% to 14% margin, with 30% undecided at the time.

[241] In 2020, Harris briefly ran for President of the United States and was later chosen as the Democratic Party's vice-presidential nominee, running alongside Joe Biden.