Region being reshaped by Indian immigrants
People born in South Asian country make up 1 out of every 5 residents in some South and East Bay ZIP codes
Earlier this year, in an epic shift, India became the world's most populous country.
And over the last decade, a similar transformation has been playing out in the Bay Area: Residents born in India now represent the largest immigrant group in the region's two biggest counties, Santa Clara and Alameda. While the change, driven by federal immigration policy and Silicon Valley's search for high-tech talent, has been playing out for years, new census estimates illustrate just how dramatic the India-born population has grown.
About 250,000 immigrants from India call the two counties home. That's enough people combined to rank as the Bay Area's fourth largest city.
The impact of the influx is showing up in simple and symbolic ways, especially along the southern end of San Francisco Bay, from Sunnyvale to Milpitas, over to Fremont and back up to Dublin. In 2022, in a handful of ZIP codes, more than 1 in 5 residents were born in India.
Bharti Sodha is one of them. She has seen the remarkable growth over the past 38 years when she and her exhusband, Viren, and their two children first moved in with Sodha's sister in San Jose.
“When we arrived,” she recalled, “she took us to an Indian restaurant in Berkeley. There was no Indian restaurant here” in the South Bay.
Now there are half a dozen in Fremont alone that specialize in popular Indian street foods panipuri and chaat, not to mention a dozen Indian grocery stores. San Jose is home to four cricket fields, according to the Northern California Cricket Association. Berkeley boasts a small Indian garment district of sari stores with brightly draped mannequins in the windows.
“Naturally, we look for India,” said Sodha, who is immersed in the now-flourishing Indian community nearly every day, planning Indian weddings, hosting Indian karaoke sessions every week in Milpitas and passing at least six Indian grocery stores on her short drive home to Fremont.
The population boom is also revealed in the U.S. Census Bureau's 2022 American Community Survey released last month, which provides annual estimates of people who live in the United States, with details about their homes and lives. The number of Indian-born residents is growing across the five-county region but is most concentrated in the South and East Bay, where the community first topped the number of residents born in Mexico in 2018. It hasn't slowed since.
In 1990, the census counted just less than 20,000 residents of Indian descent in Santa Clara County and 14,000 in
Alameda County, regardless of where they were born. Now Santa Clara County is home to 148,000 Indianborn residents — that's one out of eight county residents in 2022. Alameda's 104,000 Indian-born residents account for 6% of its overall population.
Migration from Mexico peaked in the early-tomid 2000s, and the number of Mexican-born residents here has fallen in the past decade. The establishment of the H1-B visa in 1990 created a new avenue for highly skilled workers to come and work in the United States. That coincided with the growth of Silicon Valley and its need for those workers.
In 2021, 81% of new Indian permanent residents in the United States came through preferential employment programs, whereas 6% of new Mexican immigrants came with those visas, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Now, the C-Suites at some of Silicon Valley's top companies are occupied by Indian-born executives, including CEOs for Googleparent company Alphabet's Sundar Pichai and Adobe's Shantanu Narayen.
“This first wave of immigrants from India tend to be professionals or students,” said Irene Bloemraad, a professor at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. “They tend to be more upper class people from India because they're the ones with the resources to go to school and have these skills.”
“Then slowly with time they sponsor their relatives,” she said, which along with other types of immigration has diversified the Indian-born population over time.
As the Indian community has grown, so has its influence. The India Community Center in Milpitas has grown with it. The ICC celebrated its 20th anniversary this month with a banquet and prominent guests, including U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna. The San Jose Democrat was born in Philadelphia, but in 2017 he became the region's first member of Congress of Indian descent. The same area is represented in the California legislature by Ash Kalra, also of Indian descent, who was born in Canada to Indian-born parents.
Kalra remembers that when his family moved to the South Bay in the late '70s, the local Indian families would meet at San Jose State University for special movie nights.
“That was the only way to see Indian movies on the big screen,” he said.
Now, he said, every mainstream theater in the region features Bollywood and Tollywood movies alongside Hollywood blockbusters.
The India Community Center, inspired by the Jewish Community Centers in the Bay Area, is bustling with a day care program, activities for seniors, yoga and dance classes, a robotics program for kids and a legal clinic for immigration questions. In two decades, the Milpitas center has quadrupled in size and the organization has added locations in Palo Alto, Cupertino, San Ramon and a table tennis center in Milpitas.
Bhartie Auntie, as she is known at the center, has been involved since the beginning when she first showed up searching for yoga classes. Now she considers the ICC her “second home,” a melting pot for the Indian diaspora here, a mix of people from India's 28 states.
“We get to celebrate every festival here,” Sodha said. “A Punjabi festival and a Bengali festival. In Bombay, I might not have even heard of those festivals.”
During the pandemic, Aparna Chaudhry was looking for a place to practice Kuchipudi, a classical dance that is part of India's centurieslong dance-drama tradition. Her husband's job brought them and their first-born “straight to Milpitas” from India in 2019, part of a large community of recent arrivals from India.
“Half of my (college) classmates from Delhi are in the U.S.,” she said.
She has younger cousins who came to the Bay Area in recent years for undergraduate and master's degrees, then got jobs and stayed, and she also has aunts and uncles who have lived here for 30 years.
Despite the strong Indian community here, she and her husband would like to eventually move back to India, but her second child, 9 months old now, was born here and there is lots of family here, too.
“It's a tough question,” she said.
Sodha now spends a lot of her time making sure recent immigrants, and the second and third generations like her grandchildren, can maintain a connection to their Indian culture. When she visited family in India for six months last year, she found herself missing her new home.
“We've created a different world here,” she said. “If the community is growing, if our kids are growing here, we have to provide what we want them to do,” she said.
And that has only gotten easier.
“Now you don't have to go to an Indian store,” she said. “Even Walmart has a section of Indian groceries.”