Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away?
“Very normal” is how Rupal Vaishnav describes his experience as an entrenched resident of Atlanta. He moved to the city at the age of nine, after immigrating to the US from India in the late 1970s. When his parents settled in Clayton county – a suburb south of downtown that’s now home to the world’s busiest airport – it was still largely populated by white families living in 60s-era bungalows; before that, it was the fictional setting for Gone With the Wind.
Vaishnav was one of two Indian kids in school – the other was his brother – and a strict vegetarian who spoke Gujarati at home. But he joined the school’s air force junior reserves, studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and earned his law degree from Georgia State. For the past five years, he’s worked in the local district attorney’s office and this year he ran to be a state judge in Forsyth county, once infamous for its lynchings. “The biggest thing I struggled with growing up and that I still see in my son are the identity conflicts,” Vaishnav says, now 50. “Are you American? Are you Indian? You have to get comfortable knowing the two cultures. It’s a balancing act that you get better at over time.”
Immigrants like Vaishnav have played an important role in what has been a remarkable shift in the demographics of Georgia, and politics with it. Georgia went blue in the 2020 election – and Asian American voters could well decide whether that was an accident or the new normal. Between 1970 and 1980 roughly 80,000 people immigrated here, many from Asia, where they settled in the suburbs of Atlanta – counties like Clayton, Fulton and Forsyth, which gained national infamy in the 1980s as a sundown town after a spate of Klan attacks against civil rights activists. As Atlanta’s Black population has gradually recovered population share, wealth and civil rights after decades of domestic terrorism and redlining policies, the city’s Asian American population has exploded, too.
As of the most recent census, Asian Americans comprised nearly 5% of metro Atlanta’s 6 million residents, putting them nearly level with the city’s Latino population. Most hailed from India and Pakistan, enticed by the city’s booming academic, medical and tech industries. The city is more obviously international now than it has ever been: the Confederate banners and whitesonly placards have long since been replaced by Ethiopian restaurants, West Indian markets and businesses touting Spanish proficiency. In a 2021 essay, author Sanjena Sathian, whose critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers follows an Indian-American teen in Atlanta, characterized her hometown as “a surprisingly Whitmanesque experiment in pluralism, in which unpoetic concrete strip malls substitute for lyrical spears of summer grass”. On television, Atlanta’s prosperous non-white coalition is reflected in programs such as Married to Medicine, in which an Indian-American plastic surgeon and his fashion blogger wife feature prominently within the show’s Black American ensemble.
Recently, that non-white majority has played a pivotal role in overturning Georgia’s Republican control, registering to vote in the hundreds of thousands. After close defeats in the 2016 presidential election and Senate race, the Democrats finally squeaked to victory in 2020, winning Georgia for Joe Biden and wresting control of both Senate seats for the first time since the mid-1970s. The drama of election night came down to ballots being counted in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties – Atlanta suburbs that have all seen large population growth among people of color.
That flip, from red to purple, doesn’t happen without Stacey Abrams, who avenged her narrow loss in the race for governor in 2018 by whipping together a coalition of voters of color, a long game that made her a national hero on the left. Another national figure to emerge is Raphael Warnock, who won the special US Senate election in 2020 against Kelly Loeffler, an outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, after players on the Atlanta
Dream basketball team she co-owned led an insurrection campaign against her.
But Georgia’s diverse voting bloc is fragile. Two years on, Abrams and Warnock are struggling in their Senate and gubernatorial races. And Democrats are finding that even the South Asian label is a broad one. “Even just in India, there are so many varieties of people,” says Ketan Goswami of Hindus of Georgia Pac, a bipartisan group that aims to build coalitions through religion. “Lumping us all together in this South Asian identity is, in my mind, actually very criminal.”
Even the Democrats’ big sell to the immigrant coalition, a smoother or at least shorter path to citizenship, seems a careless enticement. Many of the Indians in Georgia, reckons Vaishnav, are temporary visa holders in specialty occupations who would vote for immigration reform – but cannot. The residents who can vote, on the other hand, often have homes and families and sixfigure incomes to protect – at which point tax cuts and more cops on streets become priorities. “Once you get here”, Vaishnav says, “I think you’re sensitive to the idea that what you have you should share with others.”
Mobilizing this coalition has its challenges, too. “There’s embedded historical resistance toward electoral civic engagement,” says Berenice Rodriguez of the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The biggest gap is disinformation and language accessibility, which really affect the older generations.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are hitting back. Georgia’s GOP-controlled state legislature passed a sweeping voting law last April that cracks down on absentee balloting and voter identification, in part to short-circuit the Democrats’ hold on immigrant Atlanta. The White House also did its Georgia candidates few favors while entertaining the 2022 championship-winning Atlanta Braves, the last team with a Native-themed name in major pro sports besides hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks; press secretary Karin JeanPierre stopped short of calling for the team’s name to be changed, but said: “We should listen to Native Americans and Indigenous people who are the most impacted by this.” Robert Cahaly, a pollster and founder of the Atlantabased Trafalgar Group, found that more than 70% of locals wanted the Braves to remain the Braves, and noted the political risk of arguing otherwise, pointing out that the Democratic senators “Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff did not make a comment on whether the Braves should change their name – and two Republicans said they should not.”
More broadly, the conservative positions of the Republicans resonate with immigrant groups who value family and generational wealth – which is why efforts to court their support have suddenly become so intense. “A lot of money has funneled into the state to allow us to expand the work we’ve been doing for a long time,” says Rodriguez. “But I do fear that once the spotlight is gone, if Georgia doesn’t become a swing state, that funding will stop.”
Vaishnav’s parents borrowed money from friends to start a printing business; Mr Quik Copy has been a fixture of Dekalb county, a former civil war battleground, for almost four decades. “The county gave them a proclamation for having it in the same location since ’85,” Vaishnav said. A similar sense of permanence for Democrats, though, will be much harder won.
“People like to say South Asians are either all Democrat or all Republican,” Vaishnav says. “But I can tell you, there’s so much variety.”
Lumping us all together in this South Asian identity is, in my mind, actually very criminal
Ketan Goswami