On March 26, Priya Patel, an internet influencer with more than 190,000 followers across various social media platforms, posted a statement: “This is your friendly reminder that immigration without assimilation is invasion. Got it?” A few hours later, she followed up: “We desperately need more mass deportations. Starting with Ilhan Omar.”
Omar, for context, is a sitting U.S. congresswoman representing Minnesota. She came here as a refugee and was elected to serve by American voters. These facts don’t appear to complicate anything for Patel.
Her post went viral, quickly reaching tens of millions of views. The comments poured in: Your last name is Patel. Don’t tell me about immigration, leave. Then: I actually don’t care about assimilation. I don’t want people named Priya Patel in my country. Then: How about we start with Indians, particularly Patels, specifically you?
Here’s the thing about nativist logic. It doesn’t come with a guest list, and it doesn’t make exceptions, especially not for the people wielding it. The same crowd that would nod along to Patel’s post turned her argument upon her within hours, and they weren’t necessarily wrong to do so — not by the rules she’d just laid out.
Patel handed them the weapon. They just pointed it in a direction she hadn’t anticipated.
I don’t know if she saw those replies. I don’t know if they landed. But I keep thinking about her father.
Her father was born in Uganda. He didn’t choose to be born there, and he didn’t choose to leave, either. In 1972, when he was 3 years old, Uganda’s military dictator Idi Amin gave the country’s Indian community 90 days to get out.
Patel’s father left with his family, carrying next to nothing, and made his way to the United Kingdom. He built a life and had a daughter. She grew up to post that reminder and reluctantly admit to her father’s roots on a podcast hosted by British conservative Piers Morgan.
The reasoning Amin offered more than 50 years ago was eerily similar. Indians, he said, were refusing to assimilate. They were a drain on the economy. They weren’t really Ugandan and were refusing to change — taking up space that belonged to someone else. He called it an economic war. He promised that once the Indians left, Ugandans would finally be able to claim what was theirs.
Uganda got the expulsion Amin promised, but nothing else.
At the time, the Indian community owned nearly 90 percent of Uganda’s businesses and generated almost 90 percent of its tax revenue. Indians contributed significantly to much of the country’s commercial infrastructure — the shops, the factories, the supply chains that kept the economy moving. When they left, that infrastructure didn’t transfer to Ugandans. It collapsed.
Manufacturing output fell by more than half over the next decade. By 1985, Uganda had gone from one of the most prosperous countries in sub-Saharan Africa to one of the poorest.
The economic war Amin declared turned out to be one Uganda waged upon itself.
None of this is obscure history. None of it is hidden, either. It’s documented, studied and taught in the same political science courses in which people learn the vocabulary of assimilation and invasion and who really belongs where. Amin’s argument didn’t survive contact with reality. The country that made it is still recovering.
I’m not sure what to do with the fact that Patel doesn’t seem to know this, or knows it and has decided it doesn’t apply. Both possibilities are hard to reconcile.
Assimilation is a charged word. It has been used against immigrants for a long time — not as a standard to meet but as a line to move, a way of ensuring that belonging always stays just out of reach. And the version of it that gets thrown around most often means one thing: become invisible. Sound like everyone else. Stop being so visibly from somewhere else.
But being indistinguishable wasn’t what this country was built on. My Indian grandparents moved to the United States in the early 1970s only knowing basic English. Decades later, they still don’t speak it perfectly. Yet they still blend into Edison, New Jersey — into a community that looks and sounds and cooks like them, inside a country that was supposed to make room for exactly that.
That’s the point. The Great Melting Pot was never meant to be a single flavor. Not every pocket of stew has to taste the same. The beauty of it, the founding idea of it, is that you shouldn’t have to erase where you came from to belong to where you are.
And if you asked them today if India still feels like home, they would probably answer that it doesn’t anymore.
Just like Patel, I am half Indian. Just like Patel, my family’s roots stretch over the seas. But unlike Patel, I’ll say it without being cornered by Piers Morgan.
People who know my last name have asked me to weigh in, to decide whether she’s Indian enough, self-aware enough or worthy enough of the name. They don’t always realize our last names come from the same corner of Gujarat. But even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. The moment I start deciding who counts, I’m drawing up the same kind of list with different handwriting — and that’s exactly how the argument survives. It finds new authors.
The argument that immigrants don’t assimilate, that they’re taking something that belongs to someone else, that the solution is removal — that argument is older than Amin. It didn’t start with him and it didn’t end with Uganda’s collapse. It keeps getting made. It keeps attracting audiences. It keeps promising something that it cannot deliver.
And the people making it always believe, at some level, that the purge stops before it reaches them. That there’s a version of the guest list where they get to be on the right side of the door.
Patel’s father was 3 years old. He wasn’t on the list either. He was just a child born in the wrong country in the wrong decade to the wrong parents, caught in someone else’s certainty about who belonged and who didn’t. And now, his daughter is on the internet, drawing up her own list.
I don’t know if she ever asked her father what it felt like to be on Amin’s. I don’t know if it would change anything if she did. But I keep coming back to a harder truth: the lesson isn’t lost.
Uganda has the receipts. History has the receipts. And somewhere, a 3-year-old who’s been promised the world is still waiting for us to understand the cost.
