New Delhi: Racism, xenophobia and dehumanising rhetoric targeting South Asians has seen a steady rise in the United States over the past years, with the country’s right-wing Donald Trump-led government pushing for stricter anti-immigration stances under the guise of foreigners taking over ‘American jobs and institutions.’ This advent in racism has witnessed a corresponding influx of online hate, demeaning content, racial slurs and ridicule of migrant identities, languages, customs, appearances and accents.The Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSOH), in its recently released report titled “The Rising Tide of Anti-South Asian Hate in the United States,” examines how the proliferation of a fabricated threat against the ‘victimised’, ‘true’ American, i.e. white males, has led to calls for deportation of South Asians from the US and a rise in hate speech on social media.The report analyses anti-South Asian rhetoric across four platforms – X (formerly Twitter), 4chan, 8chan and Gab. It studied almost 5.4 lakh hateful posts on X between January 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026 and over 3,97,522 “hostile mentions” across the three fringe platforms, dominated by right-wing online communities, during 2025.Between January 2025 and June 2026, hateful posts on X increased by 75%, while their monthly volume rose 240% from the January 2024 to June 2026. Most posts portrayed South Asians as “invaders” and “job thieves,” accounting for 45% of hateful posts on X. The study also found that the racial slur ‘pajeet’ and its various iterations appeared in nearly 30% of all anti-South Asian posts on X, with mentions across almost half the posts on 4chan, 8chan and Gab.The study documented an expansive network of accounts ‘exposing’ personal and professional anecdotes of South Asians allegedly committing immigration fraud, along with a trend of influencers aggressively ambushing people at their homes and workplaces. The irony of white Americans calling South Asians invaders is not lost on anyone.Hygiene-based dehumanisation was the fastest-growing hate category on XPer the CSOH report, around 11% (59,441 posts) of anti-South Asian content on X relied on stereotypes portraying South Asians as ‘dirty’ or ‘unhygienic.’ The monthly volume of such posts shot up from 2,052 in January 2025 to 5,557 in June 2026, marking a 17% rise.Phrases such as “stinky Indians” and “filthy Indians” dominated these discourses, mocking South Asian cuisine and practices.“Posts fixate on their perceived smell, alleged lack of civic sense, and supposed inability to adhere to Western or Christian norms of cleanliness and etiquette, often attributing these stereotypes to an intrinsically uncivilised and uncouth nature. The narrative also includes abusive terms such as “street pooper” and characterises South Asians as routinely defecating in public. Indians and Hindus are also mocked as drinkers of cow urine,” the report notes.Photos of South Asian rivers, cities and beaches are circulated as evidence of supposedly uncivilised nature, with users claiming that immigrants are attempting to “transform American cities into copies of South Asian cities.”On 4chan, 8chan and Gab, hygiene-related dehumanisation accounted for 66,733 mentions or approximately 17% of the dataset. Such posts referred to South Asians as vermin, disease carriers and sources of contamination. The report also cites instances of violent attacks against Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities in the US, with certain posts describing South Asian religious communities as demonic or incompatible with Christianity. Several posts have also called for the desecration and destruction of temples, including the Hanuman Temple in Frisco, Texas.Texas, in general, has emerged as one of the most racist states in the US with openly hostile narratives against South Asians.Furthermore, criminal cases involving South Asians in other white countries like the United Kingdom have been generalised and exaggerated to promote the idea of South Asians as religiously or morally degenerate. Nearly 23, 354 posts on X, or 4% of the total, portrayed South Asians in this manner.South Asians as ‘invaders’, Texas at the heart of the narrativePosts pushing the ‘invasion’ narrative in the US allege South Asians of ‘stealing’ well-paying American jobs, suppressing wages, committing visa fraud, remitting earnings abroad and imposing ‘alien’ cultural practices on the American society.In this regard, the H-1B visa programme has emerged as a critical flashpoint. Indians seeking employment are often portrayed as displacing American candidates in the technology, healthcare and other professional sectors. Trump’s support for stricter visa requirements and racist policy reform has fuelled such perceptions.The report notes that several posts call for immigration bans on South Asian countries, as well as forced removal of immigrants of colour. On right-wing fringe platforms, 88,707 mentions invoked invasion and demographic replacement rhetoric, relating to claims that South Asians were being imported as cheap labour and that they were participating in a deliberate demographic displacement of Americans.Thus, victimisation of historically-privileged social groups, such as white Americans, is being weaponised to generate hatred against communities that in reality have borne the brunt of marginalisation and dispossession. The ‘great replacement theory,’ a conspiracy theory premised on the claim that white populations in Western countries are being deliberately replaced by non-white populations through mass migration, is the driving force behind this thought process.CSOH identifies Texas, particularly the Dallas-Fort Worth region and the suburb of Frisco, as a central point for online claims of an Indian and Muslim ‘takeover.’ Right-wing influencers and organisations are producing documentary-style videos depicting evidence of ‘demographic replacement’, while showcasing footage of South Asian neighbourhoods, businesses, temples and public spaces. The video “I Exposed Texas’ Indian Invasion,” published by YouTuber Tyler Oliveria on April 5, 2026, had amassed over 32 lakh views and another 42 lakh views on X within five months of its release.South Asians doxxed over visa frauds; influencers film confrontationsA distinct pattern of harassment of South Asians who are perceived to be H-1B visa holders has been revealed by the data reviewed by CSOH. The report lists a concerning number of X accounts dedicated to identifying and targeting immigrants who are believed to be working the US on H-1B or other visas.Such accounts single out personal and professional information shared by South Asians on LinkedIn and other platforms, republishing it on their pages to ‘expose’ their targets to the wider audience.The posts frequently included names, photographs, job titles, educational and professional histories and purported immigration status, often alongside unsubstantiated allegations of fraud or employment displacement. Many individuals were assumed to be H-1B visa holders solely on the basis of their South Asian identity, regardless of their actual citizenship or immigration status.These accounts also encouraged their audiences to report targeted individuals to immigration authorities. In some cases, influencers staged confrontations with South Asians in at their homes, businesses or workplaces under the pretext of inquiring about their visa status. These encounters were recorded, edited and shared with a large audience, along with the claims identifying individuals as suspected immigration offenders.Targeting of politically prominent South AsiansThe increased participation of South Asians in American politics has been identified as a key reason behind online-hate, with public figures trolled on the basis of their race, religion, ancestry and national origin.People of South Asian descent widely targeted on social media include former vice-president Kamala Harris, US second lady Usha Vance, FBI sirector Kash Patel, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Virginia lieutenant governor Ghazala Hashmi and lawmakers Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Shri Thanedar, Ami Bera and Suhas Subramanyam.Virginia state senator Saddam Azlan Salim, a Bangladeshi American and Muslim, faced anti-South Asian and anti-Muslim hate over legislations relating to Islamophobia, gun laws and power vested to federal immigration authorities. Sever users claimed that Salim was attempting to impose “Sharia law” through these legislations, promoting calls for him to be deported.AI-generated racist caricaturesThe study observed the increasing prominence of generative artificial intelligence use in creating racist caricatures, promoting anti-South Asian hate at a wide scale. These images and videos depict South Asians as vermin, scammers, sexual predators and supposedly unhygienic or culturally backward people.“South Asians are shown as demonic and barbaric, caricatured for their appearance and accents, mocked for their delusions of greatness, poor hygiene, and habit of public defecation, depicted as scammers and sexual degenerates, portrayed as vermin invading America, and even shown literally as feces,” the report states.Such content draws heavily on memes and internet culture, enabling hateful narratives to be reproduced and circulated in visual formats.Driving force behind rising anti-South Asian hateState power and inflammatory political rhetoric, xenophobic nationalism, longstanding racial hostility, political visibility of South Asians, economic resentment and memification of racism are the main reasons behind the recent rise in anti-South Asian hatred across the US, per the CSOH report.Online hate is not isolated from offline hostility, with both reinforcing each other. The report cited incidents of physical violence against South Asians, including the February 2025 beating of an Indian-origin nurse in Florida by a patient who made anti-Indian remarks. In July 2026, an Indian Muslim mall employee was stabbed in Utah as part of a hate crime.The report also makes mention of a Sikh truck driver who was stabbed 17 times in an unprovoked attack in Wyoming on September 13, 2026, amid heightened anti-Sikh sentiment following fatal crashes involving Sikh truck drivers in 2025.The scale and speed at which social media platforms generate and amplify hateful narratives and intolerance pose the risk of normalising unchecked racist behaviour towards minority communities. The report especially warns of the broader implications of rising racism for civil rights, social cohesion, the rule of law and democratic participation.