Census 2010 data shows that the Asian Indian population ballooned 69 percent from 2000, to 2,843,391. Thus far, the Census Bureau has released Asian Indian data only for those who reported a single race. When multiracial Indians (those who reported multiple racial identities) are factored in the Asian Indian population will top 3.2 million, according to Little India analysis.

Nearly 12 percent of the Asian Indian population in the 2000 Census was multiracial. Little India projects that the final count for the Asian Indian population, including multiracial Indians, will fall between 3.2 million to 3.3 million. The Indian population may well have touched 3.5 million, but an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Indians returned to India in recent years after the U.S. economy was jolted by the global financial meltdown.

The multiracial issue touches upon a debate that I had with two of this weblog’s co-founders ~2003: the demographic assimilation or involution of the Indian American “community.” I use quotation marks because I think that though there are commonalities and similarities it’s clearly a rather heterogeneous collection of communities, in the plural.Some of this population growth is clearly due to illegal immigration, driven in part by the fact that the Indian American community is large enough that it is viable to just “disappear” once you make it to American soil. Here’s a story about Indians from south of the border, though not Mixtec or Maya people as you might expect: More Illegal Immigrants From India Crossing Border:

Police wearing berets and bulletproof vests broke down the door of a Guatemala City apartment in February hunting for illegal drugs. Instead, they found a different kind of illicit shipment: 27 immigrants from India packed into two locked rooms.

…

Indians have arrived in droves even as the overall number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. has dropped dramatically, in large part because of the sluggish American economy. And with fewer Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border, smugglers are eager for more “high-value cargo” like Indians, some of whom are willing to pay more than $20,000 for the journey.

Indians have flooded into Texas in part because U.S. authorities have cracked down on the traditional ways they used to come here, such as entering through airports with student or work visas. The tougher enforcement has made it harder for immigrants to use visas listing non-existent universities or phantom companies.

…

Many of the Indians apprehended are Sikhs, followers of India’s fourth-largest religion, who tell authorities they face persecution back home and want asylum. Applicants need to convince officials that they have a credible fear of persecution in India. If so, the case is referred to an immigration judge.

Such persecution was common in the mid-1980s, when the state battled a Sikh secessionist movement, Kumar said. But today the ruling party in Punjab is Akali Dal, a Sikh party, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is also Sikh. “It’s all nonsense,” Kumar said of asylum claims.

These are not the poorest of the poor if some of them are managing to scrounge up $20,000, or were using visa overstays.

One of the aspects of Jatt identity seems to be the conception that they are descended from “Scythians,” what in a South Asian context would be termed Saka. When some Jatt commenters with whom I had amicable relationships with would bring this up I would gently mock them. My personal stance is that South Asians have an unhealthy obsession with presumed foreign origin, as if being South Asian is somehow shameful. This is very evident amongst Muslims for obvious reasons, insofar as Islam came to the subcontinent from West Asia. But I’ve encountered the same stance amongst Hindus. For example, Kashmiri Pandits explaining their peoples’ Persian origins.

But whatever the demerits of the excessive overall fixation on exogenous origin, I now believe that I wrongly dismissed out of hand the idea that Jatts in particular have some Scythian origin. The reason are a series of results coming out of the Harappa Ancestry Project. To be concise, it does seem that Jatts have a small but consistent proportion of northern Eurasian ancestry which sets them apart from other Punjabis. The most parsimonious explanation to my mind is that the Sakas did indeed have a genetic impact. This does not mean that I have a high confidence in this historical model. But I was clearly in the wrong in dismissing the Scythian origin myth out of hand. For that, I apologize. Also, please note that I am not claiming here that the preponderance of Jatt ancestry is Scythian. It is not. Rather, there may have been a Scythian overlay upon a typical Punjabi substrate.

If you are curious to learn more, please see the comments at the Harappa Ancestry Project.

I particularly find the subtext irritating because of the writer’s own background:

“You’ve completed a four-year university?” the recruiter asked, pen poised above my résumé.

“Yes,” I said.

“And your stream?”

“Pardon?”

She sighed. “What did you study?”

“Religion,” I said. “Well–liberal arts.”

She made a face, scribbling something.

“What does your father do?” she asked.

“He’s a doctor.”

“And your mother is a housewife?”

“No, a doctor also.”

“A doctor also! Why didn’t you go in for that line?”

“I…I didn’t want to,” I said.

“You didn’t want to?” She could no longer hide her exasperation.

“These things are different in America,” I said feebly.

A little poking around online indicates that he went to NYU and Brown. One might speculate that because his parents were both medical doctors this was relatively feasible for someone of his background. Andrew Marantz is a child of assumed affluence. Would he wish to trade his parents’ professional success and no doubt hectic schedules for a life of idyllic rural genteel poverty, albeit one graced with more leisure?

There are finite choices in this world of ours. India is slouching in a particular inevitable direction. The past will be what it was, for good or ill. So the past has been in the West, for good or ill. We don’t live in the 1950s, nor do we live in a pastoral idyll before the railroads. Family life continues, and we find a way to flourish. Andrew Marantz and his family have, despite being part of the American system of capital, production, and consumption. His Indian friends also will find a way to flourish in a more protean and dynamic economy.

In Mother Jones Marantz comes awful close to implying that authentic Indian culture is some somnolent gentle Gandhian stasis. On the contrary, being Indian, or American, or Chinese, has evolved and transmuted over the ages, and so it will in the future. Affluence does not mean one can not be authentic. Authenticity is not a fixed object, but a way of being and adapting to the circumstances, come what may.

But I thought I’d give in a try, because I wanted to look at some intra-community cross-tabs. The main aspect I wanted to look at is religion & politics. Indian Americans are overwhelmingly a Democratic-leaning community. But not all. This tendency toward the Democrats has been relatively strong in Asian Americans generally since 1992, when George H. W. Bush won that demographic. And yet I noticed an interesting trend in the American Religious Identification Survey 2008: Asian American Christians were far more sympathetic to Republicans than Asian American non-Christians. The past 20 years has seen a massive rise in the proportion of non-Christian Asians, whether it be Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, or secular. The standard narrative in American politics is that the Republican party is the white Christian party (even more so, the white Protestant party). The Democrats are the coalition of “Others”. Minorities and non-Christian whites (seculars and Jews). This has clear first approximation value, but I think the insight that Asian American Christians are more sympathetic to Republicans than other Asian Americans indicates that there is some texture which can be perceived at a finer-grain.

My goal here is exploratory, and I want to encourage readers to poke around the GSS themselves. In short I limited the data set to 1990 and later, to people who said their ancestry was from India. Unfortunately this is only a few hundred, but it may be informative for large between class differences. I focused on differences across religion and levels of education. Some notes:- I combined Christian denominations as well as Dharmic religions to maximize sample size.

• For the education oriented cross-tabs I combined those without college degrees and those with college or greater into two classes.

• I dropped Muslims because the sample size was too small.

• The columns add up to 100%. The percentages are bold. Underneath them you see the N.

I apologize for the formatting on the tables, but they’re screenshots of the GSS. The data is for real, even if the presentation is 1997.

Here’s a screenshot of the page I started with:

The numbers represent codes. As someone who’s used the GSS a lot I know that for the RELIG variable 1 = Protestant, 2 = Catholic, etc. Most of you probably don’t, so you might want to copy my starting position to begin with if you want to start cranking out tables.

First, let’s look at religion:

Now college education::

Interpretation? I think the truism for Asian Americans found in ARIS 2008 holds for Indian Americans: non-Christian Indian Americans are very averse to the Republican party and conservative ideological orientation. Looking at the religious identification by age cohort (not shown, use the COHORT variable) it seems pretty clear that because of high immigration levels the Indian American community is going through the same transition as the rest of the Asian American community: the proportion of Christians is decreasing. I suspect the shift away from Republican identification is then in part due to double alienation from the identity politics of the modern American Right, that of race and religion, common among immigrant heavy Asian American subcultures. To check, let’s look at those whose ancestors hail from Japan and China separated by those who are Christian vs. those who are not:

Again, the same tendency. This shouldn’t be that big of a surprise, after all the same division is mirrored in the general population. The Republican party and conservative orientation is associated with evangelical Protestant Christianity among whites, while Democratic leanings and liberal views tend to be associated with Jews and the irreligious (with Catholics and mainline Protestants somewhere in the middle). The valence though is somewhat different in Asian immigrant communities, which are religiously more fluid and pluralistic. Though Christian identity doesn’t seem to imply that Latinos and blacks are particularly favorable toward the American Right,* it does seem to have some predictive value among Asian Americans. It can naturally explain the much stronger tendency of Korean Americans to be Republican as opposed to Chinese and Japanese Americans. Evangelical Protestantism is much stronger among Korean Americans.

Why the difference? Identities are bundles of various factors. Race, ethnicity, religion, and class. The history of black Americans in the United States makes them somewhat sui generis. Latinos are still shifted toward the working class, and working class and poor people of color tend to vote Democrat no matter their religious identity (in fact, depending on how you identify working class, this is true for whites as well, see Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State). In contrast, Asian Americans are very diverse when it comes to class. There is a recent finding in social science that cultural values tend to matter most when people have ascended somewhat higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In other words, the “culture wars” are a middle and upper class luxury. Non-economic identity variables are particularly predictive on the upper socioeconomic strata. I suspect then that what’s going on is that non-Christian Indian Americans are often identifying with Jews and secular Americans on cultural values, as part of the “Other” coalition. Christian Indian Americans with a conservative theological bent are more likely to identify with the white Christian party, because there’s a basis for common alignment. If the thesis that education and income free people up to become more ideological and culturally conscious, then Christian identification among Indian Americans should predict Republican party identification among the more educated segment.

The sample sizes are small, but the GSS results point in exactly this direction:

* Though there does seem to be a very modest effect of Protestant identity among Latinos making them more amenable to Republican party identification or conservative ideological orientation.

Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley pushes some peoples’ buttons on this weblog. In this way she’s similar to Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. But it seems that the shine has worn off a little on the man with the golden oeuvre. It began with an optically disastrous and widely mocked Republican response to Barack Hussein Obama’s State of the Union speech a few years back. But over the years his wunderkid reputation has moved to the background inevitably as he’s gotten caught up in the same muck which afflicts most politicians who’ve been in the public eye for long enough.

Of course one can’t say that Nikki Haley has avoided muck in her short time in the national spotlight. But she’s new yet, and the media needs a human interest political story, and she certainly presents well.

In the wake of the announcement of her memoir The New York Times gives her the full treatment, South Carolina’s Young Governor Has a High Profile and Higher Hopes:

Nikki Haley, at 39 the nation’s youngest governor, loves her iPod.

When she signed a long-fought bill to bring more transparency to legislative voting, the Black Eyed Peas blasted through the Capitol rotunda here.

Joan Jett, a personal hero because of her fight to prove that women can rock, provided inspiration when it seemed impossible that a relatively inexperienced, deeply conservative woman with Indian immigrant roots could win a bid to govern the state where the Civil War began.

But Ms. Haley’s most enduring theme song, as it was when she campaigned on Tea Party politics and a nod from Sarah Palin, might be Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

It hasn’t been a year since she’s been in the governor’s mansion, so it isn’t as if they had that much to work with. Aside from the specific reference to her parents’ immigrant background and her difference from the run of the mill South Carolina Republican as an Indian American woman there isn’t much to the profile which is brown-tinged. One aspect of this is which is rather noticeable is that Haley is very light-skinned, and could probably “pass” (This is not an opening to assert how awesome you’re “brown-dar” is and how clearly brown she is to anyone with eyes. I have read enough instances where some South Carolinians were surprised about her Indian background, assuming she just liked a good tan. This could not have been the case with Jindal). Additionally, with her name change and conversion to Protestant Christianity she has assimilated to her cultural background a great deal. Contrast her with another brown American raised in South Carolina, Aziz Ansari. More saliently brown in appearance and name, instead of assimilating to the Christian majority Ansari is an admitted atheist. These are obviously different paths!

Granted, I don’t want to overemphasize the depth of Haley’s conversion. There is a fair amount of evidence in the public domain which suggests that her shift to an identity as a Methodist was more of a transition than a rupture. The exigencies of politics in the “Bible Belt” are such that it would be professional malpractice to deemphasize Christian bona fides. That she emphasizes her positive beliefs in the Christian religion, as opposed to a strong negative contrast with the “darkness” before she accepted Jesus Christ as her savior, suggests to me that Haley’s personal orientation is more toward that of moderate mainline Protestants than that of evangelicals, let alone fundamentalism. That seems obvious in that she’s a member of the United Methodist Church in Lexington, which is comfortably mainline. I also infer the nature of her beliefs in part from the What We Believe section of her church’s website. Contrast their sparse set of principles with the belief statement with that of the First Baptist Church in Lexington. Those congregations with a fundamentalist or evangelical orientation are more prone to having a precise “laundry list” enumerated in exactly such a fashion. Haley’s church does not.

But if Haley is going to be remembered in the future her religion is going to be a marginal issue. Who today recalls the curiosity that the first Italian and Jewish mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, was an Episcopalian? During his lifetime this was a major topic of discussion, but a mayor of New York with an “ethnic” background no longer merits raised eyebrows. The salient human interest points at any given period of time differ. But policy is what is the measure of a politician. In that domain it is safe to bet that Haley will follow Jindal’s path toward being entrapped by the reality that remaining popular is difficult when you have to enact changes which might anger some. It is simply a statistical fact that most politicians are like shooting stars. Only a rare few last in our imaginations. Already Haley’s approval rating is at parity with her disapproval This is probably in part due to the generally difficult economic times across the nation. And yet like many states in the South the governorship of South Carolina is a weak position. The most tangible benefit is the access to the bully-pulpit, but without cooperation from the legislative branch the executive is not going to be very effective in influencing policy in a positive sense. Haley’s predecessor, and original political patron, Mark Sanford, may have gotten a lot of national press for his conflicts with other politicians in the state over fiscal issues (not to mention his personal life!), but from what I gather he was viewed in the end as an ineffective governor.

Nikki Haley may want to be a fiscal conservative who vetoes spending, but the Republican legislature has been overriding them! This is great as far as national optics go, she can take credit for trying to cut spending, all the while the state will continue to operate as planned. Right now this detail is not relevant for national press profiles, but if Haley is elevated to a higher level this pattern will come under scrutiny. Instead of glowing puff profiles she might be faced with articles which imply that there isn’t any substance to the style.

This is a fine direction by me. A focus on a politician’s biography, their race, religion, and class origins, are natural human reactions. Personal history matters to us. Period. But it is the substantive political planks and policies enacted which will echo down through the generations.

Personal note: My own normative preference is toward a lean and humble government with minimal ambitions. But from what I can gather those politicians who believe they can push through changes through force of personality fail. Mark Sanford and Jesse Ventura are case studies in this. The institutions of America’s government are such that yelling louder or making a firmer stand does nothing over the long run. So my expectation for Haley having a lasting effect on South Carolina politics are dim. I hope to be wrong.

Addendum: I’m prone to deleting long accusatory rants about Nikki Haley in the comments. Just so you know. Diminishing marginal returns on that sort of thing.

Image credit: Dave Shankbone

It turns out that the Cal graduate has a job at a Hollywood public relations firm. Or perhaps more accurately, she had a job at a Hollywood public relations firm. I don’t feel sorry for how this turned out because of her professional aspirations. You don’t spill the beans until after you’ve made it big. On the other hand, the more general issue is rather disconcerting. Who hasn’t said something stupid or embarrassing? You can make sure to only talk to people about things, and avoid written communication, but now there are relatively easy technologies with which you can record people. Nothing is the off the record in theory. And perhaps soon in practice. I find that rather sad.

As an aside, I checked Google News for the full range of media reaction. It’s an interesting window into cultural differences. India Today has the headline “Quentin Tarantino’s Indian trick”, which I thought was kind of offensive. Does “trick” not have the implication in India that it does in the United States?

In any case, here’s a summary in the Dawn:

The details were revealed to the Pakistani media by Prof. Dr. M. Iqbal Choudhary, Director International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), Karachi University and Dr. Kamran Azim of ICCBS at a press conference at PCMD.

Highlighting the importance of the project, Dr. Choudhary said Pakistan had officially entered into the world of genome mapping and the details of the work would be published soon in a research journal. He disclosed that eminent Pakistani chemist and former chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman was the first Muslim and Pakistani whose complete genome was mapped by Dr. Kamran Azim.

“The important work will pave the way for research on heredity diseases, evolution and the over all genetic make up of Pakistanis which now hold a unique genetic pattern as a nation. In the past many people like Dr. Watson and others urged scientists not to reveal their genome publicly but Dr. Rehman has never put any restrictions for his genome draft,” Choudhary added.

As you might guess, I laud that they’re releasing this data to the public. I do find it rather weird that the Pakistani press is reporting that the first Muslim has been sequenced. Do we talk about the first Buddhist, Christian, or Hindu being sequenced? Muslims are not a clear and distinct class in relation to population biology, but I suppose for many believers this is the biggest point at issue when considering one’s self-identity.

Speaking of populations, The Express Tribune has a rather amusing short article which speaks volumes:

“Our nation is a mix of a lot of races,” said Prof. Dr M Iqbal Choudhary, who heads the project. “Pakistanis are like a “melting pot” ie a mix of Mughals, Turks, Pashtuns, Afghans, Arabs, etcetera.”

You can actually look at a lot of Pakistani genetics thanks to the HGDP data set. There are statistically significant contributions from Africans, West Asians, and even East Asians, to Pakistanis. But on average this is a very low load, less than ~5%. Pakistanis are what you’d expect, just part of the normal range of variation of South Asians. In some of the remarks and press there is the admission that Pakistanis aren’t really genetically discontinuous with Indians, but that isn’t overly emphasized (also, aside from the Baloch, it does look like Pakistanis are discontinuous with Iranians).

To make more concrete about what I’m talking about, let me show you a plot I generated a few days ago. Below are three populations, Iranians, Pakistani Pathans, and Gujarati Patels. Each bar represents an individual, and the color proportions represent ancestry mixes. I’ve labeled the colors for convenience, though they have only rough correspondence with the names I give them. You can find the full results here. The individual sequence above is reputedly a Mujahir, so I suspect they would be somewhere between the Pathans and Patels in their proportions. Note that I also added some friends & family whose samples I have at the right edge of the bar plot.

Unfortunately, as I commented a few days ago that looks like it’s not happening. The Indian population collections have been removed from the website, and replaced by Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Tamils from the United Kingdom, and Bangladeshis. The Pakistani collection is already in process, as they’re getting the samples from Lahore.This is really sad. Apparently objections from the government of India and bureaucratic impasses made it so that the Human Genome Diversity Project had to use Pakistani populations as proxies for South Asians. This is acceptable, but the Pakistani populations are on the margin of the distribution of genetic variation in South Asian populations. Just like the Bangladeshi populations. This stands to reason, they’re marginally located geographically. The Marathas in particular would have been nice, since they’re probably much more South Asia typical. Typicality matters because South Asians have enough genetic diversity that it probably is something one should consider when controlling for population structure in medical genetics. For example, there is some data out of Britain that Bangladeshis have a higher risk for diabetes all factors controlled than Pakistanis. This may be due to cultural differences, or it may be due to genetics. Until you survey genetic variation within a set of populations you’ll never know which.

When I first began blogging about genetics here some commenters expressed frankly paranoid rantings about how the new genomics was going to enable a biological weapons program against India by the I.S.I. This is stupid. Pakistanis and Indians may differ, but they are rather similar, and there’s not much difference between ethnic Punjabis on either side of the border. But if you do have paranoid fantasies, don’t worry. It looks like if you want to get genetic information your best bet is to go to the non-Indian states of South Asia. By the end of year you’ll be able to download 100 full genome sequences of Pakistani Punjabis! I suppose that’s part of some nefarious plan….

In any case, on a positive note I don’t think that the Indian establishment’s intransigence on this issue matters. There are now millions of South Asians of various ethnicities across the world. The amateur Harappa Ancestry Project has over 100 genotypes all by itself. I suspect that the government of the United States or the United Kingdom could fund genomics projects which focus on various under-represented ethnicities in public databases due to the nature of politics abroad at some point in the near future. Full genome sequences will converge upon ~$1,000 in the next 5 years (they’re currently ~$20,000 or so per person).

Addendum: If you are unconvinced as to my confidence in the very low risk of biological weapons, download my genotype and send it to the I.S.I., explaining that I’m an anti-Muslim apostate with right-wing American political views. That’s true. If you want to goad them on, tell them I’m anti-Pakistani, and that I fantasize about building a Ram Temple in Islamabad. That’s not really true, but who knows what people will believe?

Just shy of her 40th birthday, Nikki Haley will have a memoir under her belt.

The South Carolina governor’s book, “Can’t is Not an Option”, is expected to hit shelves in January 2012 and will be published by Sentinel, a conservative imprint within Penguin Group.

Elected last fall, Haley, 39, is the nation’s youngest governor.

Haley told The Associated Press in March that in her memoir “she would cover everything from growing up in rural South Carolina to her contentious 2010 campaign, when she faced — and denied — allegations of infidelity.”

Out of curiosity, does anyone read books like this? That is, books written by sitting (or aspirant) politicians obviously meant to burnish their images.

What does this have to do with this weblog? The actress who plays the protagonist in the Swedish film, Noomi Rapace, had a father who was a Gitano, a Spanish Romani (the term “Roma” is really an ethnonym for the eastern Romani). In case you don’t know, the Romani language is clearly Indo-Aryan. Its closeness to Indo-Aryan dialects of the Indian subcontinent is such that the story goes that Indian sailors who were stationed in Britain overheard, and understood, much of the conversation of local British Gypsies.

The origin of this population in the Indian subcontinent is evident through multiple lines of inquiry. Both in terms of culture, and genetics. Most of the genetic results focus on paternal and maternal lineages, but some “genome bloggers” have obtained samples from people with Roma background, and they clearly have distinctive South Asian ancestry. Because of intermarriage obviously this is not always visibly salient. How many people are aware that Charlie Chaplin was 1/4 Romanichal?But this post isn’t about Romani, but another group of brown folk who have forgotten about being brown. I’m talking about the Cape Coloureds of South Africa. It is well known that this population has ancestry form local Africans, whether Khoisan or Bantu, as well as a Northern European heritage shared with Afrikaners (culturally they are somewhat interchangeable with their Afrikaner “cousins” in language and religion). Often there is also an awareness that the Cape Coloureds have some Southeast Asian ancestry, because of the ubiquity of slaves and servants from this region of the world across the Dutch colonial empire (e.g., Suriname), as well as the existence of the Cape Malays.

But what about the Indian ancestors of the Cape Coloureds? This is not so well known, despite the fact that the Dutch brought many Indian servants and slaves to South Africa as well. Simon van der Stel, the first governor of the Cape Colony and for whom the city of Stellenbosch is named, had a maternal grandmother who was an enslaved Indian.

A few years ago a paper came out which quantified the extent of Indian ancestry in a set of 20 Cape Coloureds. It looks to be about ~10 percent. More recently I obtained 3 samples of Cape Coloured origin (unrelated). I “ran” them through the program ADMIXTURE. My results were in line with what the earlier team had found. I used my “Gujarati_B” reference sample, which seems to be Patels, to explore for any South Asian ancestry. I also compared the Cape Coloureds to Chinese, a set of San (Bushmen), Bantu Africans, and white Americans, and Yemeni Jews. The Cape Coloureds had contributions from all the groups. The Chinese are a reasonable proxy for Southeast Asians on a continental scale. South Asian ancestry for the Cape Coloureds was clearly outside of the margin of error. The fact that it was approximately the same in all three individuals suggests that it this absorption of Indian ancestry occurred early on in the ethnogenesis of the community, as there is not much intra-population variance..

Cape Coloureds are 8.8% of South African’s population. Indians are 2.6%. Assuming that Cape Coloureds are ~10% Indian, one can infer that around ~1/3 of the distinctive South Asian ancestry among South Africans is actually not within the enumerated Indian population.

This is to some extent all ancient history, though I suspect people will find it moderately interesting. But, it perhaps points us to possibilities in the global future, as identities, self-conceptions, are mixed & matched, and combinations generate novel startling configurations.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons