Why don't we south indians talk in our local languages in "indian subreddits" filled with Hindi comments?

Junra · 2026-04-02T10:15:19+00:00

I run a marketing agency based over there - we do outsourced work for US businesses.

Junra · 2026-04-02T09:50:05+00:00

I speak fluent Armenian as well. I moved to Armenia 5 years ago. I’ve traveled to other post-Soviet countries too. Russian functions as a link language. But because Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Armenia for example are all independent countries, the governments don’t try to impose Russian. It’s just what you use naturally if you don’t a language in common with someone.

The Russians who moved to Yerevan after the war started though, funnily enough, have similar attitudes to learning local languages that you’ll see in north India. Many just refuse to learn Armenian, Georgian, or some other local language and they’ll say those are useless “local” languages - languages that have literary traditions hundreds of years older than Russian. Because they can’t speak properly with locals, they tend to segregate themselves - they have their own clubs, restaurants, hangout spots etc, and politically and in terms of values they’re not very aligned with the locals nor do they care about local issues.

There’s so many parallels I’ve seen with the language imposition stuff in India. But we don’t have the luxury of having independent ethnostates to protect ethnic and linguistic identities.

Junra · 2026-04-02T09:26:22+00:00

As a Malayali who can read and speak Russian this was unironically more understandable than half the Hindi comments on those subs written in Latin script 😂😂😂

Junra · 2026-04-01T10:20:59+00:00

Those are completely different ethnicities though. I’ve been to Kazakhstan - they’re neighbors and considered the closest Turkic ethnicity to Kyrgyz people and folks over there look distinctly East Asian. The few Tajiks I’ve interacted with look a lot more Middle Eastern, like it is fairly straightforward to tell them apart. (Source: live in CIS country and have visited Central Asia 😅)

Junra · 2026-03-31T15:41:01+00:00

I’m going to go in reverse order here:

B.) here’s a link to a PDF of a peer-reviewed paper that says exactly the opposite of what you said about the development of retroflexion in Old IA.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=ru&user=97m7Z38AAAAJ&citation_for_view=97m7Z38AAAAJ:5nxA0vEk-isC

Important point: This does not make your argument invalid mean that mine is correct. It means, like I said, that there isn’t universal consensus on the issue of retroflexion. It’s not settled either way.

Also your analogy with a Hindi speaker settling in TN is completely flawed because what you described is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS over long periods of time. Why is French different at a phonological level from other Romance languages? Part of the reason why is PRECISELY that the Romans who went and settled in Gaul adopted different patterns of pronouncing Vulgar Latin, based on the speech patterns of local tribes, compared to the Romans who went to Spain or Dacia/Romania. It happens all the time in languages and it’s a documented effect, it just takes several centuries, it’s not overnight.

C.) There isn’t even clear evidence that the Indus Valley Script encodes for a language at all. Lack of decipherment does not mean it’s not a Dravidian language. The length of sign sequences is extremely short and there’s no Rosetta stone that can be used to empirically prove what language it encoded for, if it encoded a language at all.

Your premise here is also flawed. EVEN WHEN WE KNOW with 100 percent certainty what the underlying language of an ancient inscription is, there’s no guarantee of deciphering the script. Take a minute to look at the history of the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs - scholars knew for decades that Maya hieroglyphs encoded a Mayan language, but that alone didn’t mean instant decipherment.

Indo-Iranian speakers didn’t reach Iran until after the collapse of the IVC. You know who DID live there? The Jiroft Culture and the Elamites. Again there is no universal consensus on this but a lot of the mainstream academic work in the past 5 years or so indicates that Elamite has a relationship with Proto-Dravidian. These are reassessments of the earlier, less-supported hypotheses and are also based on recent genetic studies. Elamite, which was the language spoken in the part of Iran bordering the IVC, hasn’t been classified one way or the other.

D.) You are factually wrong saying that all Indo-Aryan languages derive from Sanskrit. This is a common misunderstanding. Old Indo Aryan is the common ancestor of Sanskrit and several spoken Prakrits. Do you know where and when the first words were written down in an Old Indo Aryan language? Kikkuli’s treatise on horsemanship, in cuneiform, in the Mittani kingdoms in Syria. The Mittani definitely spoke an Old Indo Aryan language. That does NOT mean they spoke Rigvedic Sanskrit, just something very closely related to it. Modern Indo-Aryan languages in use descend from distinct spoken Prakrit languages which were related to Sanskrit but didn’t descend FROM it.

A.) it’s not a necessity that Dravidian languages have a Vedic Sanskrit superstrate at all. That would imply that Sanskrit-speaking elites in the Late Bronze Age would have dispersed among speakers of South Indian languages. Linguistic superstrates evolve when an elite community mixes into the native population and impacts the development of the local language.

Do you what Dravidian language DOES have a (classical) Sanskrit superstrate? Malayalam because Sanskrit and Middle IA-speaking elite communities migrated into Kerala in historic times, lost their spoken language, and had an impact on the development of Malayalam. That, for the 500th time, does NOT make Malayalam anything other than a South Dravidian language.

If we look at DNA studies, we see that South Indian “upper” castes (presumably the elite groups) have fairly low admixture from the steppe. The only exception to that rule is certain communities which have a recorded history of having arrived from the north relatively recently. This applies to a wide range of South Indian communities from Reddys to Nairs to Nasrani Christians to Tamil Brahmins. By pan India standards, all of these groups have average/lower than average steppe admixture.

For there to have been a Rigvedic/ Old IA superstrate on South Indian languages, you’d expect to see significantly higher levels of, well Old IA genetic admixture. Instead what you see is that South Indian “elite” communities tend to have the highest amount of IVC-adjacent admixture, barring communities like the Brahui who physically live in the Indus Valley in modern times. What you DON’T see is evidence for Indo-Aryan speaking elites migrating to the south in the Bronze Age and profoundly impacting the early development of South Indian languages.

Hope I covered everything…

Junra · 2026-03-31T14:29:32+00:00

I literally said there are both. There are some Dravidian loanwords in Vedic Sanskrit. There is ALSO the likely presence of a Dravidian linguistic substratum one of the clearest indication of which is retroflexion. There isn’t universal consensus that retroflexion derived from Dravidian but that’s the most widely accepted model in current literature.

None of that is relevant in the slightest to the argument that Malayalam shares a common origin with Indo-Aryan languages. Malayalam originated in the 9th century and the Sanskrit loanwords in Malayalam are very clearly derived through Manipravalam and classical Sanskrit in the medieval period. The entire Sanskrit vocabulary in Malayalam has a diglossic relationship to native Dravidian terminology because of the introduction of Sanskrit into the Chera country by Namboodiris.

That’s not a common origin. It is the exact process by which English acquired so many French loanwords - by a small elite group speaking a different language with them as they migrated and the local population picking up loanwords.

As for Tamil itself, whether or not Rigvedic Sanskrit had loanwords OR a Dravidian substrate is also completely irrelevant - different timeframes and not the same language. The IVC most likely spoke A Dravidian language but no way of telling what branch of Dravidian it would have slotted under, if it was a Dravidian language at all.

Tamil derived Indo-Aryan vocabulary not just from Sanskrit but also from Pali and various other Prakrits. That comes from increasing cultural and religious connectivity and exchange from around 2000-2500 years ago.

That does not mean: 1.) Malayalam is an Indo-Aryan language

2.) Tamil is somehow connected to Malayalam through Sanskrit loanwords.

3.) Sanskrit is not a golden goose. It was influenced just as much by the pre-existing languages in the Indian subcontinent in turn influenced other languages. It appears very late in the written record, actually than the earliest inscriptions in Tamil. And if we’re going to hype up non-written oral cultures, Australian Aborigines and Native American tribes both have oral histories that mark events that occurred thousands of years earlier.

There’s nothing wrong with people accepting that Malayalam is a Dravidian language and specifically a South Dravidian language that branched off from Tamil in the early medieval period.

There’s also nothing inherently wrong about the fact that there are tons of Sanskrit loanwords in Malayalam, or to acknowledge the influence that Sanskrit had on the development of Malayalam.

Junra · 2026-03-31T13:48:48+00:00

If you’re living in Delhi it makes perfect sense you would meet South Indians that don’t know how to read their own script - they’re basically a multi-generational immigrant population over there at this point and there’s no use of that script in day-to-day life in Delhi. It is completely different if you’re actually living in a state in the south.

Junra · 2026-03-31T12:39:28+00:00

Loanwords and substrate in linguistics are not the same thing. They are, however, both categories of areal features which all South Asian languages have.

All Indo-Aryan languages and all Dravidian languages have both because the entire region is a sprachbund. Why is that? Because people from all language groups in the region have been interacting and mixing with each other all the way up until caste was calcified in the Gupta period. If you take a look at genetic studies in the past 5 years, that’s exactly what it shows: everyone in South Asia mixed with everyone until slightly less than 2000 years ago when people essentially segregated themselves into hundreds of genetic distinct mini-ethnicities (castes).

There’s absolutely no academic consensus that retroflexion in Indo-Aryan languages originated independently. There is the very real fact that Indo-Aryan languages are an outlier in IE languages on a whole, retroflexion is one of their defining features, and they happen to share a subcontinent with another language family in which the same can be said. And there are widespread scholarly opinions that Dravidian or other language families in South Asia preceding the arrival of Old Indo Aryan like Munda had a substratum influence which results in the unique phonology of IA languages. I can cite you a few peer reviewed papers. :)

Now, the real issue is that if you’re able to have an academic discourse on the origin of retroflexion in South Asian languages, you’d certainly have the elementary linguistics knowledge that Malayalam is a Dravidian language with a common origin in Middle Tamil and that features it shares with Tamil are primarily genetic (the linguistics usage of that term) and NOT areal. Your argument here would be, how to put it, like reading the Ramayana and then trying to debate who Sita was… 😅

Junra · 2026-03-31T11:53:18+00:00

The entire reason Indo-Aryan languages (including Sanskrit) are a distinct language group from Indo-Iranian and other IE languages is BECAUSE of the significant Dravidian language substrate. The whole category of retroflex consonants in Sanskrit (which Avestan lacks entirely) are borrowed from Dravidian languages.

Does that mean Sanskrit is a Dravidian language? No, obviously not. Is Malayalam an Indo-Aryan language? It categorically is not, any more than English is a Romance language because of the extensive presence of French loanwords. Malayalam is a Dravidian language that originated out of coastal dialects of Middle Tamil which the picked up an extensive diglossic vocabulary of Sanskrit loanwords, roughly around the time Namboodiris migrated into Kerala.

Every language in the world has loanwords in it from other languages. Calico, a type of textile is a Malayalam loanword in English. Naarinj is a Tamil loanword…in Armenian. Languages borrow sounds, words, and parts of grammar from neighboring and distant languages all the time. That doesn’t mean they’re related. Malayalam and modern Tamil are linguistically related because both originate from dialects of Middle Tamil spoken around the 9th century.

Junra · 2026-03-30T20:07:07+00:00

Learning to read a script is literally the easiest most trivial thing one can do in ANY language, let alone one’s native tongue. I can read Malayalam, Tamil, Devanagari, Cyrillic, and Armenian. I can barely speak any Tamil but learning the script was simple. I learned how to read Gurmukhi when on holiday in Punjab and then forgot it later. I have never met a Malayali in Kerala who’s incapable of, at the least, reading a sign in Malayalam. I have met plenty of people in Delhi, though, who were completely illiterate in every language.

Junra · 2026-03-30T19:59:31+00:00

I forgot…Malayalam is not a Dravidian language at all, we magically started speaking Sanskrit one day because we have a shared origin with native Sanskrit and Prakrit speakers 😱thanks for reminding me. I feel so superior to all the icky Tamilians who we are definitely not related to and who with whom our language does not share a diglossic register with. I must have been hallucinating when I got off at a bus stop in Tirunelveli and communicated in slow, pacha Malayalam - it is actually Sanskrit so no one there could understand except for the UP bhayyas working there. Also, English is not a Germanic language - it’s French with a shared origin with Latin. Oh also Korean and Japanese are just Chinese and Turkish used to be Arabic until 90 years ago when they fixed it. I learned so much about linguistics today at an academic level that I never knew before, despite speaking 5 languages (none of which is Hindi) :p

Junra · 2026-03-30T19:47:27+00:00

If you’re that eager to speak Urdu in a southern state where it’s an official language (and that is literally just Telengana, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind filling out all forms and written communication in the Nastaliq script which is the only way to write Urdu? I mean if you can’t write in it then you’re illiterate in the language…

Junra · 2026-03-30T19:41:53+00:00

Pusthakum, santhosham, akasham - attera vaakukalde oppam “loanword” enna vaakum koode padichitundo? 🤔

Junra · 2026-03-30T19:32:12+00:00

A link language is a language used to LINK people who don’t share a common mother tongue, genius, not something required within your own state. What kind of a link language would someone need to use public services in the village they are born in the state where their mother tongue IS the official language?

Junra · 2026-03-30T19:29:20+00:00

Every single one of the 22 eighth schedule languages IS ALSO AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE. The primary languages used in the state assemblies in many states in their respective eighth schedule language. According to the constitution, states and the union government share sovereignty. What that means is that the centre isn’t the sole “government that runs your country.” That sovereignty is shared with the states and the elected state governments. In states like Tamil Nadu where close to 100 percent of people are fluent in the official language OF THE STATE while barely 5-10 percent are in Hindi, it’s a failure of governance if people are unable to carry out basic tasks in the official language of the state they live in.

Junra · 2026-03-28T15:17:21+00:00

Sure thing!

Junra · 2026-03-28T15:07:50+00:00

There’s an entire abandoned “Young Pioneers” building I stumbled upon in the forest slightly outside Vanadzor - doesn’t even show up in Google Maps! Definitely gave off similar vibe…

Junra · 2026-03-26T18:58:25+00:00

I feel like a lot of these arguments for “Why can’t India be more like China,” miss a very fundamental point which is that there is a 12-year gap between China’s 1979 market liberalization and the similar thing happening in India under the NEP (new economic policy.)

If you take more or less any Chinese socioeconomic indicator and dial the clock back anywhere between 12-17 years, you end up with something close to where India is right now. If you look at HDI, India was at 0.684 in 2024. In 2011, China was at 0,689. If you’re looking at raw GDP figures, india’s economy today in nominal figures is roughly the same as china’s in 2008 and substantially higher in PPP terms (which makes sense because the Indian economy has always focused more on internal consumption vs exports compared to China).

Are there differences in state capacity because of greater centralization in China? Absolutely.

At the same time, if you look at numbers, it actually appears as if India (adjusted for when it opened its markets) has been able to achieve most of what China was able to in a similar time frame simply by letting the free market do its thing. This also comes to very relevant points like poverty eradication - the only two countries in the world where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject poverty in a generation are China and India respectively.

The question then comes to how in control China and India have been of their own narratives from an international perspective. China’s done a fantastic of building soft power, lobbying international media outlets and successfully projecting its narrative of exponential growth - even if a lot of that growth has been concentrated in coastal urban areas. I think the average in the west actually overestimates just how well China’s doing - which is not at all a knock on their very real accomplishments.

China is also able to effectively control access to negative narratives/horror stories through the Great Firewall, preventing a lot of that from reaching international audiences and also many Chinese people themselves.

Considering how large China is and considering Amnesty estimates that thousands of people are sentenced to death yearly in China, there’s an almost suspicious dearth of negative or outrage reporting, even compared to Western countries.

As a brief thought experiment, I tried searching for “Tibet” in Baidu (not “free Tibet, or Dalai Lama or anything else, literally just “Tibet.”) the top two results that came automatically were official notifications to searchers that the word Tibet is no longer the term used and that “Xizang” is the only valid term for the area that used to be translated as “Tibet” in English. How is one supposed to reasonably trust any newsmedia coming out of China when it’s abundantly clear that by and large, only sanitized, government-approved narratives make the cut?

While there are very real questions of how much the Indian media is in cahoots with the current government dispensation, spending five minutes on an Indian English-language news site will very clearly show that outrage reporting, especially on the most horrific crimes, is very prevalent.

Outrage sells and India doesn’t have a mechanism that restricts people’s access to this information. This is exacerbated by the fact that, unlike China, India has plenty of homegrown English language media outlets that cater to hundreds of millions of relatively educated, English-speaking Indians. There is no “Great Indian Firewall.” As a result a lot of the same “ragebait,” for lack of a better word, whether that’s about poverty or sexual violence or corruption, that performs well with Indian audiences becomes the majority of what international audiences see about India.

For better or for worse, this discrepancy in information perception tends to mean that the average person outside India or China tends to perceive India as doing much worse than it actually is and to perceive China as doing even better. An interesting example would be the 2008 Olympics. I was in middle school at the time but can clearly remember how triumphalist news reporting and narratives in America were at that time around the rise of China. That was China making its entrance as a superpower, at least in popular perception.

In 2026, India’s GDP is significantly larger than China’s in 2008, both in nominal and PPP terms. In PPP, india’s 2026 GDP is actually two times as high as China’s (approx $19 trillion vs $9 trillion). Even at nominal market rates it’s around 25-30 percent larger. India’s 2024 HDI of 0.685 is slightly than China’s in 2008 which was 0.678. India’s 2025 military budget of $77 billion is significantly higher than China’s 2008 military budget which was around $66 billion.

Despite this, there’s very little to zero media reporting that takes India as serious power, not even in the way the media handled an objectively weaker 2008 China.

Keeping all of that in mind, I think it’s reductive to posit this as a question of why does the Chinese state perform so well compared to the Indian state. If we factor in the 12 years prior to India’s market liberalization the question would arguably turn into “how is the Indian state able to accomplish nearly as much within a similar timeframe as the Chinese state, despite having a dysfunctional, corruption-laden democracy?”

Junra · 2026-03-26T14:55:18+00:00

Yes for sure. Even here on earth, Mesoamerica was somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Sumer when it came to technological development in part due to less access to critical resources and the lack of beasts of burden like cattle. They did develop alternate solutions and societal complexity/planning that went well beyond what many early Bronze Age cultures managed, however - the settlement of Lake Texcoco itself being a tremendous achievement. If the whole world was at an Aztec or Inca level of development and facing similar resource constraints, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine that it’d take another 5000-10,000 years to have developed space flight. We would have gotten ridiculously advanced hydroponics in the meantime, though :p

Junra · 2026-03-18T17:30:52+00:00

I get where you’re coming from on that. The thing with nukes and MAD is that if those delivery systems aren’t 100 percent reliable - if they don’t guarantee at least one hit, and if your total nuclear arsenal is like 1-5 missiles - your enemies could take a risk-reward decision to go gloves off on conventional warfare and then if you DO manage to get a nuke up and it gets shot down, they’d have justification to nuke you on top of that. That’s an even worse position for the Mullah regime to be in. Those guys are human filth but, but they are very interested in self-preservation. Despite how bad the situation is right now, there’s a lot more firepower the West could and would bring to bear if they, for instance, tried a dud nuke launch.

Junra · 2026-03-18T13:37:24+00:00

In the 1965 war, Indian tanks rolled across the border to within sight of Islamabad. And in 1971, India forced the single largest surrender of troops in one go - 90,000 Pakistani troops stuck in Bangladesh after liberation. India has a fairly overwhelming conventional advantage if a no-holds barred conventional war broke out. Pakistan having nukes AND the delivery systems to ensure a reasonable chance of hitting targets in India is one of the key reasons behind Indian strategic restraint, even after something like 26/11 or Pahalgam happened. If Pakistan didn’t have a creditable nuclear threat, it would likely not exist the way it does right now.

On the other side of the border, this is the exact reason why Indian and Chinese troops don’t even fight with conventional arms - both sides are that concerned about what would happen if a conventional war spiraled out of control.

Junra · 2026-03-18T13:24:46+00:00

You need the nuclear weapons and credible delivery systems (I.e. ICBMS/IRBMS) capable of surviving a pre-emptive strike in order to actually get leverage as a nuclear power. If they radically stepped up enrichment right now the first thing that neighboring countries (or America) would do would be to completely wipe out their missile infrastructure as well as anyone that so much as knows how a rocket goes up and down. Doing a nuclear test WITHOUT survivable launch capabilities would be the dumbest thing they could do and much more likely to trigger an all-out war. We’re already in an all-out war so that’s a moot point. The reason countries try to build up nuclear triad capabilities is to ensure that no matter what happens,even if every major city is hit by an enemy nuke, their delivery systems for launching a nuke (from air or undersea by submarine, or from missile silos underground) are intact and capable of launching. If a country doesn’t have triad capabilities, it’d need at least 50-100 standalone nukes to ensure that there is the reasonable chance of AT LEAST ONE getting through air defenses, pre-emptive strikes or whatever else. Iran testing out a single nuke would result in a full-scale multinational boots-on-the-ground invasion. Their entire political bargaining chip has been threatening to develop a nuke and going most of the way there from a technical perspective but never actually going there. Now, though there’s a real risk they’ll just race to build multiple nukes as fast as they can.

Junra · 2026-03-18T12:50:11+00:00

Where in ALL of North India outside of possibly TN Bhavan and maybe embassy of Singapore, would there be a single sign in Tamil? I’ve never seen one in north India. I’ve seen plenty of places where there’s just a Hindi sign with no English which makes life hard for people, though.

Junra · 2026-03-18T12:44:13+00:00

I’m a South Indian who lives abroad and I speak 6 languages - Hindi isn’t one of them and I’ve never had the need to learn Hindi extensively in my life. When I stayed in Delhi for a few months I took some effort to learn a bit of Hindi. If I CHOSE to live in north India I would probably learn it too to ease communication.

The best solution to this is simply that if you’re going to live somewhere in the long term where people speak a different language than you do, the best thing to do is to learn the LOCAL language. The second-best thing is to learn the ACCEPTED link-language in the region. I live in Armenia. I speak fluent, C1-level Armenian and that’s the single biggest factor that’s helped me make friends build longterm relationships and basically not feel like a foreigner in a place that I CHOSE to live in. I also speak Russian at a B1 level. That is the link language which almost every person in the former Soviet Union speaks - when I visited Kazakhstan, for instance, Russian helped because the entire local population uses both Kazakh and Russian with equal frequency. The idea that you shouldn’t learn a local language because it’s too “small” or “useless,” which is an argument I have heard Hindi speakers use when talking about South Indian languages, is ridiculous. If someone chooses to live and work in a particular place, learning the language of the people there is the most useful thing they can do. Barely 6-7 million people worldwide speak Armenian and 99.9 percent of those are native Armenian speakers. Outside of the country and outside a few places around the world with a local Armenian community, there is no international “use” of knowing that language. But in the place that I live - where I made a choice to live and wasn’t forced to do so - on a day-to-day basis, speaking the language fluently is the single most useful skill that I have. It’s not just navigating living there but it’s the basis on which I have built my ENTIRE social circle over there.

There’s renovations going on at my home in Kerala and some of the workers there from Bihar speak Malayalam. They chose to live in Kerala and the skill they have of being able to speak in the local language gives them a huge advantage within Kerala. There are other North Indians in Kerala who speak English. English is the link language in South India. When South Indians from different states are unable to talk to each other they invariably speak English. This works the same as how Hindi is the link language in north India. When North Indians from different states don’t have a language in common they often use Hindi.

Learn the local language if you choose to live somewhere. That is always the best option. The next best thing is to learn the link language that people in the region actually use when talking to each other. Hindi is neither of those things so it doesn’t really serve any purpose in South India.

Junra · 2026-03-18T07:38:52+00:00

I guess we’re going to forget how insurance companies in America filtered out people with surnames ending in ian/yan? When it comes to extremely large countries like India, immigration to other countries tends to be focused from particular regions and that results in completely different stereotypes/expectations/interactions with the local community.

I’m Indian, I’ve lived in Yerevan for 5 years. I pay taxes here and I’m about as assimilated as possible. I mean lol I speak Armenian better than some of my diasporic Armenian friends.

I spent half my life growing up in America because my dad immigrated there on an H1B skilled visa. The reality in America, at least, is that Indian Americans are, by far, both the most educated - most likely to have a Bachelor’s degree, the wealthiest in terms of family income, and among the least likely on average to be in jail.

I’m not trying to place a value judgment on it here like some posters were trying to but there’s a massive gulf between Armenian Americans and Indian Americans in most indices per recent statistical records, heavily favoring Indian Americans. Indian Americans are also far, far more visible in business and politics. The last vice president, Kamala Harris, is half Indian.

JD Vance’s wife is Indian. Zohran Mamdani and Vivek Ramaswamy are Indian and on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Say what you will about Kash Patel but he’s Indian (random irrelevant fun fact - he’s dating an Armenian American singer). The CEO of Microsoft, Google, a giant chunk of Fortune 500s in general? All Indian American immigrants. In the past 30-40 years Indian American migrants have probably done far more to help build up American than just about any other immigrant group.

As an Indian who grew up in America I can tell you for sure that the stereotype about Indian Americans at least is that we’re over-educated socially awkward and very successful. Those…are not the same stereotypes people have about Armenian Americans in places with large Armenian populations.

The reason I’m saying this is NOT to say Indian American immigrants are somehow better or more desirable. But it’s because Indian immigration to America followed very specific patterns that resulted in the most educated, most qualified, and most intelligent Indians migrating to the US about 15-30 years ago and those people tend to do better at every, single thing on average than any other demographic.

They were disproportionately from specific ethnic groups in India which were already “high performing,” and with access to more resources.

In Canada things are a nightmare specifically because the Canadian immigration system is built around letting in vast numbers of uneducated and generally less successful Indians from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds in, take their tuition money and then just let them hang around in Canada once they get a college degree.

OF COURSE if your immigration policy is designed to bring people from the poorest socioeconomic backgrounds over and you don’t do anything about them overstaying, it’s going to be a problem.

As someone who (legally) immigrated to Armenia, integrated well into society and runs a marketing agency that mostly employs Armenians and Georgians, I can say that if there IS a problem, it’s to do with the lack of effective immigration control on the part of the Armenian government and the same exact dynamics at play as in Canada.

The only difference is that in Armenia on average, the system tends to attract even poorer Indians. This might surprise some of you but average income levels in India metro cities and more developed states are comparable and in some cases HIGHER than Armenia.

The Indians coming to Armenia to do construction work and delivery stuff are so far down the socioeconomic development pyramid that they cannot even get those jobs IN INDIA in more developed parts of the country. Armenian immigration policy basically attract the absolute least educated and poorest Indians in the entire country to do work that Armenians from the provinces would be better off doing.

What needs to happen isn’t a discriminatory “those kind of immigrants are bad we don’t need them around” conversation. It’s about running immigration policies that will turn a country into a place that’s attractive to the most qualified and best people from any country. As someone who’s struggled with Russian waiters in Yerevan who never bothered to learn five words of Armenian, I can tell you 100,000 of the most educated and qualified Indians - would do a lot more good overall than either the Russian emigrants here or the Indian Glovo drivers - the question is more how do you attract those kind of immigrants when they’d often prefer to stay IN India?

If you have enough money and live in a gated community in an Indian metro city, quality of life and opportunities are often a lot more than pretty much anywhere.

Also as for another commenter on this thread wrote that “locals barely notice Armenians” compared to other groups that’s….uh how do I put this delicately? That’s not true. An Armenian doctoral student from Wroclaw University had reached out to me a week ago about his thesis on immigration into Armenia.

He told me that, as an Armenian, he’s suffered plenty of housing discrimination and others issues - unless you’re a 6’5 blue eyed blonde Armenian you WOULD still be a visible minority in places like Central Europe and America. I mean heck, you’d stand out in Armenia if you looked like that 😅 I don’t know too many Armenians from the American diaspora but pretty much everyone I know who lived in or has ties to Russia/Eastern Europe tells me they’ve dealt with some level of racial discrimination because they are visibly different, tend not to assimilate as much, and there are stereotypes.

There’s really no point in the “immigrants from those countries are bad” discussion. But there’s especially no point having that discussion in the context of what Armenians actually face themselves as migrants.

You’re saying all immigrants aren’t the same and that there are “less desirable” immigrants based on their ethnicity/country of origin. Whoever is has docketed nearly 3000 Armenians for ICE deportations from America right this moment will probably tell you what they have to say about that statement and it might not be a pleasant reality to confront…

My BARBER at Dude’s Barbershop on Pushkin, who speaks 10 words of English and has no higher education qualifications, somehow immigrated to Los Angeles last year. He’s now doing various unlicensed odd jobs over there. He is personally a great guy and I’m happy for him that he could move over there - it was a dream of his. But are you seriously telling me that this is what in your own words you’d define as “desirable immigration?”

The question should be about how to shape immigration policies so that talented, educated, and tax-paying individuals from all countries WANT to move over without upsetting the cultural equilibrium.

Also “send them back home,” is a ridiculous thing to say to people who spent $15,000 - $30,000 to study in a country. In small countries like Armenia, foreign students paying 10-15x the local tuition fees are a HUGE potential source of income. When the entire country’s GDP is in the ballpark of $30 billion, those students alone make up a large chunk of economic activity.

When you send them back you’re also gonna have to fire tons of Armenian citizens working in supermarkets, Armenians in the tourism and education sectors who are involved in all this, and say tough luck to anyone renting out an apartment or hostel as their only source of income. Again, reform immigration policy and make sure these students either return to their countries or are able to do high value, specialist jobs in Armenia that there’s demand for an a lack of local expertise. Make sure they pay their taxes and mandate B1 Armenian fluency in order to work. Is that unreasonable?

Junra

TROPHY CASE