Hate speech against Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis in the United States is rapidly increasing online, according to the report. The increase is due to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and rhetoric, economic instability, and the growing prominence of the South Asian community in American life.
A report entitled “The Rise of Anti-South Asian Hate in the United States” released by the Center for the Study of Systematic Hate (CSOH) on Sunday found that the amount of monthly hate against South Asians in the United States on social media platform X increased by 240 percent from January 2024 to June 2026, from 12,904 posts to 43,843 posts.
Recommended stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
Researchers identified more than 542,000 hateful posts on the platform against people of South Asian descent living in the United States from January 2025 to June 2026 alone, with five of the six busiest months dropping at the end of that period.
The researchers used the United Nations definition of hate speech. They tracked repeated anti-South Asian slurs and rhetoric online and reviewed posts to filter out criticism that did not meet UN standards.
They found that nearly half of hate posts about X accused South Asians of invading the United States, stealing jobs, and threatening the country demographically, while the derogatory slur “pajito” and its variants appeared in 30% of hate posts about X and 45% on fringe platforms.
Posts depicting South Asians as dirty and unsanitary increased by 171% on X, “the fastest of all narratives.”
This hatred frequently fractured South Asia’s ethnic and religious groups into one, with Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis confused with each other, and Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians also treated as a monolith.
So why now?
Racism against Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis has a long history in the United States, but researchers say the current surge reflects a combination of long-standing prejudice and new political and economic pressures.
The report points to the H-1B visa program, which allows U.S. employers to hire skilled foreign workers, as a major flashpoint. Indians make up more than 70% of H-1B visa holders, and researchers have linked some spikes in anti-South Asian hate to political battles over the program, such as when President Trump imposed a $100,000 payment requirement on certain new H-1B applicants in September 2025.
“Such actions play a powerful symbolic role in a deal that reinforces the hostility of Trump’s base toward South Asians,” the report said.
The report makes similar claims about the administration’s rhetoric, highlighting President Trump’s speech at the AI Summit in July 2025 in which he criticized U.S. technology companies for outsourcing jobs to India, after which researchers observed a spike in anti-South Asian rhetoric online.
As a more recent example, the report points to a since-deleted September 2026 Department of Homeland Security post, “Transformers: Age of Deportation,” which featured a Sikh man known as “Mr. Singh” and urged people to “get off the roads.”
Days later, the Department of Education posted “Make College Football Great Again” after Texas Republican Beau French complained about the presence of South Asians at University of Texas football games.
The report argues that such rhetoric reinforces the idea of South Asians as outsiders who “can never truly belong to the country.”
From “model minority” to job thief
Economic resentment is another factor, the researchers wrote, with some successful South Asians increasingly being used as a weapon against them.
Once stereotyped as a “model minority,” Indian Americans are now portrayed as “opportunists and con artists,” and South Asians are more widely used as scapegoats for anger over jobs and the economy.
This comes as South Asians have become increasingly prominent in American politics, from former Vice President Kamala Harris and New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani to Vice President J.D. Vance’s wife Usha Vance and politician Vivek Ramaswamy. The report documents racist attacks against figures across party lines, highlighting how Mamdani’s primary and mayoral victories, for example, triggered a surge in anti-South Asian and Islamophobic abuse.
The researchers say both trends are now combined with “anxiety on the part of the majority about loss of status” and fuel the “Great Replacement Theory,” a conspiracy in which the white population of Western countries is replaced through systematic takeover.
Social media also turns these narratives into targeted harassment.
Researchers discovered X-accounts in which influencers confronted people in their homes and workplaces and posted the encounters online, while exposing South Asians who had been robbed of their jobs or accused of committing visa fraud. Doxxing refers to posting personal information online, such as your home address.
In one example, right-wing influencer Sara Gonzalez posted a video to her more than 500,000 followers that included a report of harassment against South Asians who she accused of abusing the H-1B program.
Meanwhile, researchers say generative AI has made it easier to create content that portrays South Asians as “filthy, unclean, sexually predatory, culturally backward, or a demographic threat.”
Although the report primarily tracks hatred through what happens online, the researchers write that online hatred “does not exist separately from offline forms of hostility.” The newspaper cited a July incident in which an Indian Muslim mall worker in Utah was repeatedly stabbed, which federal prosecutors have charged as a hate crime. In September, a Sikh truck driver was stabbed 17 times at a truck stop in Wyoming.
“Online and offline hatred can reinforce each other as narratives, stereotypes, and forms of demonization move between digital platforms, political discourse, media, and everyday life,” the researchers wrote.
