Nativist nimrods like Texas’ Bo French reject the immigrants we all should welcome

The other day Bo French — a Texas Republican candidate for a powerful statewide office that regulates the oil and gas industry — posted a picture that made him furious.

It showed about a crowd of University of Texas undergraduates, all apparently Indian-American, wildly cheering the Longhorns’ epic 20-point fourth-quarter comeback against top-ranked Ohio State.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

“I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans,” he added.

Many on the “New Right” flocked to social media to defend French.

They shouldn’t have.

First off, UT-Austin’s undergrad student body is made up of over 80% Texas residents, significantly higher than the national average for state schools.

Roughly 10% of students are from outside the state, and foreign students comprise around 4% of the latest freshman class, around the national average.

Of course, there’s no way French could determine whether the cheering students were Texans or foreigners based on how they “looked.”

What he meant by “Texan” was “white.” Every other part of his complaint is a distraction.

But it’s true that the Indian-origin population of the University of Texas is “overrepresented.”

Bo French, candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, Friday, March 27, 2026. REUTERS

That’s because Texas grants automatic admission to the top 5% of each Texas high school’s graduating class, and Indian-Americans excel at academics.

We can have a meritocratic country that rewards the brightest and hardest working — or we can have a country where bean-counters reward people according to skin color.

It seems increasingly clear that a growing contingent of the new right, like the identitarians of the left, craves its own affirmative action. 

Yes, it’s every nation’s prerogative to set immigration policy limits, whether it’s how many people or from where.

Concerns over importing too many immigrants from the same place at the same time are completely legitimate, especially since we’ve stopped expecting newcomers (as well as our own children) to embrace the constitutional order.

Texas Longhorns fans react after a touchdown. x/TexasLonghorns

But an argument for selective immigration is a lot different than deriding a bunch of students over immutable differences like the color of their skin or their ethnicity.

With all the hysteria, you might be surprised to learn that Americans of Indian descent make up somewhere around 1.5% of the entire US population, around 1.8% in Texas.

The notion that Indians are overrunning the nation is preposterous.

And they are indeed assimilating: Of Indian immigrants age 5 and older, 79% are already proficient in English.

Anyone who’s ever watched a spelling bee understands that Indian-American children probably have a pretty good aptitude for language.

Around 77% of Indian-Americans age 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree; about 45% have advanced degrees.

Educational attainment doesn’t always translate into material success, but Indian-Americans thrive in capitalism.

High numbers become doctors and engineers; the current CEOs of Google, Microsoft, IBM and FedEx are Indian-Americans.

The median annual income among Indian-headed households was $151,200 in 2023, the highest of any ethnic group in the country.

The crime rate among Indian-Americans is virtually imperceptible.

Sounds like the kind of immigrants we want.

If newcomers, for instance, congregate in welfare enclaves and import Third World ideas, that’s a problem.

But Indian immigrants’ success was attained without government help: Around 6% of Americans of Indian descent live below the poverty line.

To put that in perspective, immigrants from places such as Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan and Syria have welfare dependency rates ranging from 40% to 70%.

If we’re going to continue to have some level of immigration, and it seems highly likely that we will — a near-record high 73% of voters in a rolling Gallup poll agreed with the statement that immigration was a “good thing” — we should be celebrating those who are best suited to acclimate to American culture, and rejecting those who are not.

But these nimrods running around referring to themselves as “heritage” Americans because their ancestors came to this country early on engage in a kind of stolen valor.

The United States isn’t an aristocracy.

Anyone who got here and was naturalized or born here is an American.

They are judged by their actions.

All people have cultural, ideological and theocratic baggage.

They have their own principles, habits, rituals, outlooks, temperaments, hierarchies of morality, and societal arrangements that form their worldview.

Immigration only works if newcomers shed that culture and embrace our civic identity.

There may be no more obvious way to do that than wearing a cowboy hat and erupting in rapture with 100,000 of your neighbors to cheer a team nicknamed the Longhorns as they play one of this country’s quintessential games.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.