In January 2024, X carried 12,904 posts a month hating on South Asians in the United States. By June 2026 the monthly count was 43,843. That is a 240 percent jump, according to a report from the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) titled “The Rising Tide of Anti-South Asian Hate in the United States,” published Sunday.
Researchers counted more than 542,000 hateful posts aimed at people from South Asia living in the U.S. between January 2025 and June 2026 alone. Five of the six worst months came at the very end of that stretch. They applied the United Nations definition of hate speech and reviewed posts by hand to weed out criticism that fell short of it.
What the posts say
Nearly half accused South Asians of invading the country, stealing jobs or threatening it demographically. The slur “pajeet” and its variants turned up in 30 percent of hateful posts on X and 45 percent on fringe platforms. Posts painting South Asians as dirty or unhygienic grew 171 percent on X, “the fastest of all narratives.” The abuse lumped everyone together: Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis treated as one group, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians as another.
The report ties the surge to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and rhetoric, economic anxiety and the community’s growing visibility in American life. It singles out the H-1B visa program as a flashpoint. Indians hold more than 70 percent of H-1B visas, and researchers linked several spikes to fights over it, including September 2025, when Trump imposed a $100,000 payment requirement on certain new H-1B petitions. “Such actions serve a powerful symbolic function, in the bargain reinforcing the hostility of Trump’s base toward South Asians,” the report said.
A sharp spike also followed Trump’s July 2025 speech at an AI summit, where he criticized U.S. technology companies for outsourcing jobs to India.
Government accounts and influencers
The report points to two recent examples. A September 2026 Department of Homeland Security post, since deleted, was titled “Transformers: Age of Deportations.” It showed a Sikh man identified as “Mr Singh” and told him to “get off our roads.” Days later the Department of Education posted “Make College Football Great Again,” after Texas Republican Bo French complained about South Asians at a University of Texas football game. The report argues such rhetoric reinforces the idea that South Asians can “never truly belong in the country.”
Resentment over money plays a part. Indian Americans once stereotyped as a “model minority” are now cast as “opportunists and cheats.” South Asians have also become more visible in politics, from Kamala Harris and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Usha Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, and the report documents racist attacks on figures across party lines. Mamdani’s primary and mayoral wins set off spikes in anti-South Asian and Islamophobic abuse. Researchers tie the trend to majority anxieties about lost status and to the “Great Replacement Theory,” a conspiracy about white populations in Western countries being deliberately replaced.
From screen to street
Online, the hate becomes harassment. Researchers found X accounts doxxing South Asians accused of taking jobs or committing visa fraud, and influencers confronting people at their homes and workplaces and posting the results. In one case, right-wing influencer Sara Gonzalez posted a video to more than half a million followers in which, the report says, she harassed a South Asian person she accused of exploiting the H-1B program. Generative AI has made such content easier to produce, researchers say.
The report insists online hate “does not exist in isolation from offline forms of hostility.” It cites a July attack in Utah in which an Indian Muslim mall employee was repeatedly stabbed, charged by federal prosecutors as a hate crime. In September, a Sikh truck driver was stabbed 17 times at a Wyoming truck stop.
