As a final-minute touchdown sealed the Longhorns’ comeback against Ohio State, the student section at the University of Texas at Austin exploded in joy. Texas is huge, and the freshmen in the crowd had come from every corner of the state just weeks earlier; the easy fraternity in the football stadium made anyone in burnt orange feel like kin.
The next morning, Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner in Texas, posted a photo on X of South Asian students celebrating in the stands. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French said, referring to students’ brown skin. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
Picked up by the algorithm and carried into college game day feeds, French’s post broke out from right-wing social media. The post was not an aberration. As the South Asian population has grown in Texas, French and other far-right Texans have raged against South Asians in the state.
When immigration across the southern border slowed in 2025, nativists in Texas turned their attention toward legal immigrants in the state. Today, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in Texas, and among Asian Americans in the state, Indians are by far the largest group. The Asian American population in multiple North Texas suburbs has more than doubled since 2010. Though Asians are still a minority in those cities and the state at large, provocateurs such as French have made panicked, caustic warnings telling White residents that they’re being replaced. “The future of Texas and our culture does not depend on capitalism, as some would argue, but by ridding our state of third world foreigners,” French wrote on X in November. (French did not respond to interview requests from The Washington Post.)
In monetized posts, deft conservative influencers have managed to spread this anti-Indian backlash outside of white-nationalist circles by connecting it to class tensions in Texas. As older blue-collar industries in Texas decline, the health care and tech sectors have grown, and many Indian Texans have taken jobs in those dynamic industries. French and others on the right have focused their ire on one group of transplants in particular: recipients of the H-1B “high skill” visas.
Last week, reposting a photo of an Indian American executive of the Texan supermarket chain HEB, French said “H1B scammers, which is most H1Bs, are intentionally replacing American workers with their low IQ, document mill fake diploma having, non assimilating third worlders.”
During the Republican primaries this year, the H-1B program, which is managed entirely on the federal level, became one of the biggest campaign issues in the ongoing statewide elections. In January, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) banned all public universities such as UT from hiring staff on H-1B visas. Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, announced investigations into dozens of companies that hire H-1B workers.
That political alliance — both Abbott and Paxton have endorsed French in the general election, though Abbott opposed French in the primary — has made it harder for the two men to craft their response to French’s tweet about UT students.
Abbott, who has hosted Diwali celebrations at the governor’s mansion in Austin, gave a statement to a Dallas Morning News reporter that French’s post was “not my message,” but he didn’t criticize French by name or call for him to take down his post. He complimented the students in the crowd for coming together.
“We unite under the brand of Texas. That doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities,” Abbott said. A spokesman for Abbott’s campaign did not respond to questions.
Paxton, meanwhile, has not addressed French’s post. On Sunday, after his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, posted on X that Paxton should “condemn this blatant racism,” Paxton responded by posting, “I condemn racism in all its forms,” then accused Talarico of anti-White racism. A Paxton spokeswoman told The Post the campaign had no further comment.
The “high-skill” H-1B visa program is a way for college-educated foreigners with specialized skills to get temporary work authorization through U.S. employers. The program is one of the only pathways for Indians to legally immigrate to the United States. This creates a filtering effect: Since the program began in 1990, a disproportionate share of Indian immigrants have arrived with advanced degrees and technical expertise. That contributes to Indian Americans today ranking as the highest-earning and highest-educated ethnic group in the country.
After many state Republicans lambasted French’s post about the UT students, French went on a conservative radio talk show to defend himself, arguing he wasn’t criticizing the students for their race but rather because he assumed they were the children of H-1B recipients — an assumption he ostensibly made based on their race.
“There are many people in Texas who are here on H‑1Bs,” French said. “I believe it’s a bad thing, and now their children are getting preferential treatment to get into places like the University of Texas. That is the problem, and I think most people would agree that that’s a problem.” The show’s host noted that French had long praised Abraham George, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party, who is an Indian immigrant. (George did not reply to a request for an interview.)
Sanjay Narayan, a lifelong Republican who grew up in Plano and who ran unsuccessfully for a statehouse seat in the GOP primary this year, said French used criticism of the H-1B program as an unconvincing disguise for the anti-Indian racism that has “been brewing for a while” among some conservatives in Texas.
“Let’s just be frank about this. If that crowd had been Russian transfer students who could not speak English, does anybody think that he would have snapshotted that photo and classified them as foreigners?” Narayan said. He pointed out that the law requires UT to enroll a student body that is at least 90 percent made up of Texas residents, and it caps international students at under 5 percent of the class. Two of the students in the picture French posted told the Dallas Morning News that they are U.S. citizens.
When Narayan, who was born in New York, ran for a statehouse seat in north Dallas, his X replies and DMs filled up with xenophobic messages. Narayan said it’s become hard to have a “legitimate” conversation about the H-1B visa program.
“It has become coded with race now … and it’s clear that a lot of the people who originally were making the anti-visa-program arguments were not actually interested in the particulars of the policy,” Narayan said. “They were pushing a racial agenda.”
Some of the fastest-growing South Asian populations in the country are in well-heeled suburbs in North Texas, around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. It was in this soil that French seeded his political career.
A landowner and one-time head of an international security company, French spent years trying to make a name for himself as a right-wing activist the new-fashioned way, writing shock-value social media posts and ingratiating himself with other influencers hungry for notoriety.
French made a few failed runs for the Texas statehouse in the 2010s but remained a minor player in North Texas politics. But as the decade went on, an opening appeared for someone who could speak with his bombastic style. Around Dallas-Fort Worth, rows of McMansions began to fill with South Asian families, and construction crews broke ground on new mosques and Hindu temples. In 2023, French entered a special election for chair of the Republican Party in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, and narrowly won. Now, with a new official platform, French capitalized on some longer-term White residents’ angst that their hometowns were changing without their consent.
Animosity toward immigrants has been a part of Texas politics since at least the Mexican revolution, and French adapted that rhetoric to fit changes in the state. “The average Republican still thinks of Mexicans, who are predominantly hard working and Christian, when they hear the word ‘immigrant,’ French posted on X this June. “The reality is most migrants now are muslim or hindu.”
In one recent example of this brand of politics, Carlos Turcios — a North Texas Republican operative who has spoken at events with French as well as Paxton — shared a video on X of the Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple in Frisco, a wealthy suburb of DFW. “This is not Islamabad, Pakistan, or New Delhi, India. This is Frisco, Texas,” Turcious wrote. “Third World Aliens that reject assimilation are coming in through H-1B Visas. Frisco has been INVADED!” Turcios did not respond to a request for comment sent to his X account.
Nabila Mansoor, executive director of Asian Texans for Justice, a nonpartisan civic engagement group, said that political “bad actors” had poisoned class anxieties with racist division.
“The Indian community, the South Asian community — they are in these nicer neighborhoods, with nice cars. And I think there is some resentment towards that,” Mansoor said. She said other locals, struggling with unemployment, layoffs and inflation, had difficulty watching South Asian transplants “doing well for themselves.”
French has been explicit in his attempt to alchemize this class anger into racism. In January, he posted: “Democrats have convinced everyone, including most republicans, that the battle is rich vs poor. This hid the fact that it has just been white vs everyone else.”
Soon after Donald Trump came back into office last year, French began arguing that the president’s “Mass Deportation” policy didn’t go far enough. Deporting only undocumented immigrants would do little to address the demographic shift in North Texas driven by Asian Americans and legal immigrants.
In early 2025, French suggested that the country should “denaturalize and deport foreigners,” regardless of their citizenship status. “There are 100 million people in America who shouldn’t be here,” French posted on X. “Nothing else matters until we do that. It solves almost every problem.” French made it clear that in his repeated calls to deport roughly a third of all Americans, he was including tens of millions of citizens who were born in the United States to immigrant parents. In one post, he said he wanted to deport at least some Native Americans, as well.
French’s calls for denaturalizing citizens became popular in the Republican primary this year, when a candidate for attorney general called for the deportation of state Rep. Gene Wu, a U.S. citizen and chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus — a call French amplified. Wu said that French’s recent post is just a more blatant example of anti-Asian rhetoric he’s heard from state and national Republicans in recent years.
“For the Chinese community, everyone is a spy. For the Muslims, everyone is a terrorist. For the Indian community, everyone is a scammer,” said Wu, who represents a district in Houston. “Bo French is saying [the UT students] don’t belong there, they probably did something wrong.”
John Huffman, a Republican and former mayor of the fast-growing North Texas town Southlake, said French had taken cynical advantage of North Texans who were struggling to adapt to change. “I think, unfortunately, he tapped into a very real and virulent strain of racism in the Republican Party that’s specifically aimed at Indians,” Huffman said.
Southlake’s Indian population, while still small, has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Huffman said he can’t understand, from a “moral or political standpoint,” why some of his fellow Republicans have attacked these residents, many of whom vote Republican. Huffman, for his part, has been happy to accept invites to Diwali celebrations and other holidays.
“So many of my Indian friends across the metroplex that I’ve met have chosen Texas, chosen North Texas, and they have invested massive amounts of time and money and effort into becoming great American citizens here,” he said
Mansoor said that recent polling from Asian Texans for Justice has found that a plurality of Indian Texans identify as conservative. Huffman has heard from multiple Indian American friends since French’s post went viral. “They wanted to vote Republican,” Huffman said. But French’s language has turned them away. “They’re like: ‘Screw you guys. Like, obviously, you don’t want us,’” Huffman said.
Further south in the state, in the majority-Latino town of Sabinal, Mayor Erik Gomez, a Republican, said he’s worried not just that French has alienated Indian Americans from the Republican Party. “I’m brown,” said Gomez, who is Hispanic. “I’m pretty dark. Pretty soon, I’m going to be too dark for these people.” Gomez said he will not vote for French. But neither was he ready to support his Democratic opponent.
In the days since French’s post went viral, Republicans in Texas have battled over a question: Are we opposed to Indians in Texas because some of them are immigrants or because they’re Indian?
Julie McCarty, founder of the powerful conservative activist True Texas Project, said that the condemnation French had received from other Republicans after his post about UT was “the usual suspects doing the expected faux outrage.”
“The Establishment hates Bo and found something they could twist to make him look bad,” McCarty told The Post in a message Tuesday. “So they pulled the puppet strings of their dutiful lackeys, and on cue they all put out social media posts with the same talking points. But it backfired because the grassroots are not stupid, and they agree with Bo.”
Most of the elected Texas Republicans who criticized French nonetheless continued to endorse him in the race for railroad commissioner, the powerful office that regulates oil and gas in the state. (Abbott and Paxton have maintained their endorsements.) Since the post, French has gained tens of thousands of followers on X and has fundraised off the outrage.
In a torrent of essays and posts, many conservatives defended French, arguing that Americans with long lineages in the U.S. are owed a “debt,” which apparently includes preferential consideration for jobs and college acceptances.
On a radio talk show Monday, French argued that positions at UT ought to be reserved as part of the “legacy of Texas for Texans.” He and others have coalesced around the idea of “heritage Americans,” the belief that one can’t become “Texan” the same way that a high-schooler applies for college or an immigrant registers for a visa. It requires the right ancestry.
“My family came to this country in the 1600s from Europe. They conquered this land, tamed the wilderness and sought their fortune,” French said at the Young Republicans of Texas convention in November. “So to say that I am dismayed at the attack on our heritage, the very people who built this country, is an understatement.”
For Narayan, the Republican from Plano, the idea that Texans with lengthier pedigrees in the state deserve preferential treatment in admissions colleges or job applications reminded him of “DEI” — a reference to “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a kind of affirmative action for White Texans who are falling behind their Asian peers in test scores and job advancement.
“I reject the idea that because you have deep bloodlines, that somehow you are more American or more worthy of a particular classification or reward,” Narayan went on. “That smacks of the exact same type of DEI policies based on a particular race — it’s saying that we want special dispensations for people based on some immutable characteristic.”
The post The nativist provocateur who keeps pushing the Texas GOP further right appeared first on Washington Post.
