How big is Bay Area boom in India-born residents? Together, they’d rank as the region’s fourth-largest city
Indian immigrants now make up 1 out of every 5 residents in some South and East Bay ZIP codes
An update to an earlier version of this story has been added at the end of the piece.
India overtook China as the world’s most populous country earlier this year.
In the Bay Area, a similar transformation has occurred over the last decade, with residents born in India now constituting the largest immigrant group in the region’s two largest counties, Santa Clara and Alameda. While the shift has been occurring for years as a result of federal immigration policy and Silicon Valley’s search for high-tech talent, new census estimates show just how dramatic the India-born population has grown.
The two countries are home to approximately 250,000 Indian immigrants. That is enough people to make the Bay Area’s fourth largest city.
The influx’s impact is visible in simple and symbolic ways, particularly along the southern end of San Francisco Bay, from Sunnyvale to Milpitas, over to Fremont, and back up to Dublin. In a few ZIP codes in 2022, more than one in every five residents was born in India.
One of them is Bharti Sodha. She has witnessed incredible progress in the 38 years since she and her ex-husband, Viren, and their two children first moved in with Sodha’s sister in San Jose.
“When we arrived,” she says, “she drove us to an Indian restaurant in Berkeley.” In the South Bay, there was no Indian restaurant.
In Fremont alone, there are now half a dozen restaurants that specialize in popular Indian street foods like panipuri and chaat, not to mention a dozen Indian grocery stores. According to the Northern California Cricket Association, San Jose has four cricket fields. Berkeley also has a small Indian garment district with sari stores and windows with brightly draped mannequins.
“Naturally, we look for India,” said Sodha, who spends nearly every day immersed in the now-thriving Indian community, planning Indian weddings, hosting Indian karaoke sessions in Milpitas every week, and passing at least six Indian grocery stores on her short drive home to Fremont.
The population boom is also evident in the United States Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey, which was released last month and provides annual estimates of people who live in the United States, as well as information about their homes and lives. The number of Indian-born residents is increasing across the five-county region, but is most concentrated in the South and East Bay, where the community surpassed the number of residents born in Mexico for the first time in 2018. It has not slowed down since.
In 1990, there were just under 20,000 residents of Indian descent in Santa Clara County and 14,000 in Alameda County, regardless of where they were born, according to the census. Santa Clara County now has 148,000 Indian-born residents, accounting for 8% of all county residents in 2022. Alameda’s 104,000 Indian-born residents make up 6% of the city’s total population.
Migration from Mexico peaked in the early to mid-2000s, and the number of Mexican-born residents in the United States has declined over the last decade. The creation of the H1-B visa in 1990 opened up a new path for highly skilled workers to come to the United States and work. This coincided with the expansion of Silicon Valley and its need for workers.
According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, in 2021, 81% of new Indian permanent residents in the United States came through preferential employment programs, while 6% of new Mexican immigrants came with those visas.
Indian-born executives now hold C-level positions at some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies, including Google parent 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 UC Berkeley professor 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,” she told me.
“Then, gradually, they sponsor their relatives,” she explained, adding that this, along with other types of immigration, has helped to diversify the Indian-born population over time.
The Indian community’s influence has grown with it. Milpitas’ India Community Center has grown alongside it. This month, the ICC celebrated its 20th anniversary with a banquet and prominent guests, including US Rep. Ro Khanna. Although the San Jose Democrat was born in Philadelphia, he became the region’s first member of Congress of Indian descent in 2017. Ash Kalra, who was born in Canada to Indian-born parents, represents the same district in the California legislature.
When Kalra’s family moved to the South Bay in the late 1970s, he recalls that the local Indian families would gather at San Jose State University for special movie nights.
“That was the only way to see Indian movies on the big screen,” he went on to say. He claims that now, every mainstream theater in the region shows Bollywood and Tollywood films alongside Hollywood blockbusters.
The India Community Center, which was inspired by Jewish Community Centers in the Bay Area, is bustling with a daycare program, activities for seniors, yoga and dance classes, a robotics program for children, and a legal clinic for immigration questions. The Milpitas center has quadrupled in size over the last two decades, and the organization has expanded to Palo Alto, Cupertino, San Ramon, and a table tennis center in Milpitas.
Bharti Auntie, as she is affectionately known at the center, has been involved since the beginning, when she first arrived looking for yoga classes. She now considers the ICC to be her “second home,” a melting pot for the Indian diaspora here, a diverse group of people from India’s 28 states.
“We get to celebrate every festival here,” said Sodha. “A Punjabi festival as well as a Bengali festival.” I might not have known about those festivals in Bombay.”
Aparna Chaudhry was looking for a place to practice Kuchipudi, a classical dance that is part of India’s centuries-long dance-drama tradition, during the pandemic. Her husband’s job brought them and their first child from India “straight to Milpitas” in 2019, joining a large community of recent arrivals from India.
“Half of my (college) classmates from Delhi are in the U.S.,” she went on to say. She has younger cousins who moved to the Bay Area in recent years to pursue undergraduate and master’s degrees, then got jobs and stayed, as well as aunts and uncles who have been here for 30 years.
Despite the strong Indian community here, she and her husband would like to return to India, but her second child, who is now 9 months old, was born here, and there is a large family here as well. “It’s a tough question,” she admitted.
Sodha now devotes much of her time to ensuring that recent immigrants, as well as second and third generations, such as her grandchildren, maintain a connection to their Indian culture. She missed her new home while visiting family in India for six months last year.
“We’ve created a different world here,” she told me. “If the community is growing, if our kids are growing here, we have to provide what we want them to do,” she told me. And it’s only getting easier. “You no longer need to go to an Indian store.” Even Walmart has an Indian grocery section.”
