As we are about to read Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories regarding migration and encounters, it is important to understand who she is and where she came from. Jhumpa Lahiri is an award winning author and professor at Princeton University. Her parents are from Calcutta, India, but immigrated to the United Kingdom before eventually relocating to the United States when Jhumpa was three years old. Lahiri has said that she regards herself as a proud American and proud Bengali, so with this, it is also important to analyze the history of Indian immigration into the predominantly white and western United States of America.
Within Indian immigration to the United States, migrations have occurred in three distinct waves. The first wave occurred directly after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This replaced a quota based system of immigration with a preference based system that brought in highly valuable, potential citizens. Within this wave, the 12,000 immigrants a year were made of many doctors, scientists, and engineers, and overall, people that were deemed highly valuable based on their skills. The second wave, which occurred in the early 1980’s, resulted directly from the first wave. This was because most of the over 30,000 new Indian immigrants, came with the help of them having relatives in the United States that had already settled here. The third wave is currently ongoing but began in the mid 1990’s. This was due to many tech companies, wanting to avoid the Y2K crisis that was looming in the minds of many Americans. This made this third wave highly dense in computer engineers and specialists. Two thirds of the 2.4 million Indian Americans came during this third wave, as of 2015. These three waves show how people of India have come to the United States in such substantial numbers, why they have come, and how they are currently still coming.
With all of this information on the immigration waves of Indian Americans, we can understand why Lahiri’s family and many other Indians have come here, how the presence of their other immigrants affect everyone’s perception of them, and helps us identify and quantify some of the unappealing stereotypes that are cast upon Indian-Americans. I believe it is important to understand these immigration patterns in order to understand what it is like to be an Indian-American immigrant.
Global Insights, Chazen. “A Singular Population: Indian Immigrants in America.” Columbia Business School, 2017, www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/chazen-global-insights/singular-population-indian-immigrants-america.
Jie Zong, Jeanne Batalova Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova. “Indian Immigrants in the United States in 2015.” Migrationpolicy.org, 13 Oct. 2020, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indian-immigrants-united-states-2015.
“Jhumpa Lahiri.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 2 June 2020, www.biography.com/writer/jhumpa-lahiri.