Praxis+Theodicy wrote: ↑Tue Oct 14, 2025 12:50 pmHe did say that, indeed. But that has nothing at ALL to do with h1-B Visas, which he also said in the same post. Since you seem to know his intentions, maybe you can draw the line connecting the two things. Afterall, H1-B visas allow
Indians to live
here, which is an entirely different reality from his
children living in
India. He is either insane, and he is saying something that doesn't line up with reality, or he is
inferring something else.
If a place becomes composed of Indians on nonimmigrant visas, i.e., a visa where one signs a declaration they have strong ties to their home country and intend to return, then in all reality it becomes something like a colony or a settlement of India.
For a comparision, suppose a depressed, backwater town has a large amount of Amish who move in. Formerly, the town was composed of Catholic people and had a small parish, people retired there, there weren't too many jobs but the ones that did exist were staffed by locals.
The Amish move in, open businesses, buy out existing ones and the owners retire, and tend to hire their own Amish people to work in them. They don't attend the Catholic church but have their own churches. Their culture takes over and predominates. It is safe to say it is no longer a "Catholic" town, but is now an Amish town. And it would be ridiculous to claim anything other would happen; if the Amish move in to an area, they don't "assimilate". Pennsylvania Dutch becomes the prevailing language. If you are one of the natives of that town, you won't understand the conversations of others, your neighbours, or what you hear at the local diner.
Indians don't assimilate either, generally speaking. They bring their culture, languages, and customs with them, for good or for bad. They show up, fund their own temples, hire each other, and generally form their own cultural enclaves.
I think it is reasonable for people to feel uncomfortable when they feel displaced and not want to be replaced, whether by Amish people or by Indians or by anyone else.
Perhaps what he means to say is "I don't want my kids growing up in close proximity to anyone who has anything to do with India"?
He didn't say that, so that isn't what he meant.
I'm not sure, but that seems like the only way I can understand it having any coherent meaning. It's the closest thing I can think of that would actually have some semblance of logical connection to H1-B visas.
I do not know the man, so I cannot judge where he falls on the scale of "clear-minded" to "detached from reality." There is an old phrase, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Perhaps this man's intentions were not truly as malicious and evil-hearted as they appeared. Perhaps he truly is detached from reality, and whenever he sees someone with a foreign accent, he believes he (and his children) have been magically transported across the world to a place with entirely different laws, customs, culture, currency, etc.
His original point of frustration was having his own local street taken over by a street observing some festival related to a pagan holiday. It's not like as a Christian he can go and participate in their pagan festival in any meaningful way. (If it were me, I would be finding tracts in Hindi or Tamil or whatever and passing them out to local people, but that's just me.) Most people (about 97%) are not very interested in assimilating to other cultures or learning more about foreign cultures. 3% of people (such as myself) are. It is important we respect the 97% of people who would prefer to only associated with their own kind, often delineated by language, ethnic group, or religious leaning.
I think he was simply frustrated that he finds himself living in a neighbourhood composed of people who speak their own language,
Yes. Is that unreasonable? I think it's fine to want to grow up in a place where people speak and share a common language.
And this of course informs whether discipleship or discipline is needed from his church. Both terms refer to the same thing, of exhortation to the Christian to be more Christlike. The church does need to handle that very carefully. If someone in our church believed the earth was flat, I hope we'd treat that differently than someone who publicly proclaimed that all Jews were evil or something. Both might be a bit detached from reality, but if it is merely a case of incredible ignorance, "church discipline" might not be the best course of action.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot.
There is a town or a region in India. It was formerly composed of a group of people, let's say, Telegus. For whatever reason, the large, trans-national Indian supergovernment has decided to open it up to development from foreigners. Large swaths of Amish, Mennonite, and Baptist settlers start coming in, along with a handful of Albanian Muslims too. They are well-funded and seem to be connected with a few multinational employers who used to provide a lot of the local jobs. It used to be a farming community, but due to poor commodity prices most of the local people have been reduced to just renting their farm land out and then working for one of the big corporations.
The Amish and others who show up are able to start renting or even buying out right this land. They also start popping up first in the local jobs, and then in management positions working for the multinational companies too. A few local businesses start to be sold, too, including the convenience store that was known to always offer a widow on hard times a spot to sell some food items to make a bit of extra money, and the gas station that would always hire teenagers as cashiers. The Albanians buy that one, and don't allow other vendors on their property anymore. They are thrifty, and convert the back part of the store into an apartment and their extended family lives there and takes turns working the shifts so the station can be open longer.
The Baptists take over the convenience store, and stop selling alcohol and cigarettes, and expand the food options - except they don't let anyone else set up a little food stall anymore. Instead they sell mass produced options and start catering to a more "upscale" clientele. Somehow, they get a government grant intended for "impoverished" areas to help start small businesses, but they used this loan to buy out the convenience store from the former owner, who was deeply in debt and willing to take a deal for below market value. After securing this loan, the Baptist family uses the revenue from the store to leverage their way into more loans and keeps buying out more similar stores like that in the region. They keep acquiring employment based visas to fly in more of their cousins, relatives, and even people from other Baptist churches in the part of Texas they're from and set them up with housing and jobs.
The Amish people are eager to find good land, and find a lot of the land has been under-utilized. They rent some of it but also start making cash offers, and some of the families who have held the land for generations decide to accept. Nobody is quite sure how, but the Amish seem to have unlimited amounts of cash, and when there is an auction for a family where the main breadwinner died and there were unable to pay the relevant taxes, the Amish outbid everyone else, including one of the wealthier local Telugu families. People are shocked, and the bulk of the money goes to the loan sharks and the government. The tax rate goes up, and the local government is happy because the tax based is expanding - and the Amish always seem to be able to pay their taxes on time.
They start farming it, and the workers all seem to be Amish now, with a few Mennonite workers scattered in and Telugus only hired for the lowest-paying jobs - if at all. An old custom of allowing workers to plant their own small patch on the fringes of the fields or the least desirable parts is no longer allowed. Some of it is converted to pasture for beef cattle, which makes the Telugu people in their Hindu religion feel very uncomfortable.
The press describes this all as "progress" and praises the Amish, Menonnites, Baptists, and Albanians for bringing economic progress to the region. There is some political controversy about whether to grant even more work visas, but both local and multinational employers insist there is actually a worker shortage, and that local Telugu workers "don't want to work". They are described as lazy, or drug-addicted, or only wanting to sit around playing on gambling apps on their phones all day.
A shiny new mosque is built by the Albanians on the ground of what used to be a Hindu temple which fell into disrepair. There is anti-proselytization law, but the Albanians, Amish, and Mennonites don't seem to really want anyone else to ever see their religious services anyway or invite anyone to attend. Some of the Baptists have a church service on Saturday evenings in the Telugu language, but everything else including on Sundays is conducted in English. In this backwater part of A.P., most people don't learn English in school. The Amish and Mennonites speak Pennsylvania Dutch and use German at their church services.
The birth rate in A.P. has been declining, down to a TFR of 1.5 average births per woman, and there is a lot in the media about how the declining birth rate means it's important to accept immigrants. The Amish do seem to move in and have large families, and so do the Albanians. It becomes more and more common to see a woman in a kapp pushing a stroller with two babies in it.
The price of housing just keeps going up and up, as more and more people move in who can afford to buy or rent - pushing the native people farther and farther out to the margins. It doesn't help that the Amish are willing to live in a small 3 bedroom farmhouse with 7 or 8 kids, sharing rooms; the Albanians will set up little apartments in the back of the gas stations; the Baptists build dormitories with bunk beds. They save wealth this way. But the native people talk about how there used to be a time when most young families could afford a house with an extra room, but that's not possible anymore. The local press praises the thriftiness of the migrants, such as the Baptist young families who are willing to have 2 young couples share a 2 bedroom flat.
Some of the Baptists and Mennonites get mixed up in politics, even. A few have acquired permanent Indian citizenship, and run for office. It seems odd they would run for offices with the BJP party, which is allegedly Hindu-nationalist, but at the same time, they are praised for the amount of capital and jobs they bring into the country. Eventually, names like Kauffman, Jones, and Hoxhaj start to show up in places like regional councils and school boards. It seems government jobs (which always had a reputation for a bit of nepotism) are likewise going to people with names like Miller, Johnson, and Prifti.
Spending initiatives from the government start to get redirected; some people want to ask why there is so much government money being spent on loans to build more gas stations, but they just keep popping up. Schools start to have sections on Amish and Alabanian history, some of which feel may be rather romanticized and leave out important historical details. The BJP party praises this as part of their dedication to India's minority cultures, and is rewarded with the new migrants' extensive fundraising and get-out-the-vote campaigns. The Telugus used to feel confident supporting the BJP, the regional TDP being in a comfortable alliance with it. Now, there are signs of that fracturing. But the only other option is the Communist party sort of alliance, which many of the locals don't feel comfortable with because of some of their more extreme ideology.
As time goes on, the percentage of the population that is foreign-born or has a foreign-born parent increases; the distribution of wealth becomes so skewed that the wealthiest racial group is now white people, much as the wealthiest racial group in America is Asian (including Indian) people.
Amid all this, someone in a formerly Telugu rural area takes a video of an Amish barn party, complete with the drunkenness and questionable conduct they are known for. "I want my kids to grow up in India, not Holmes County," is the caption.
The end.
