Murali Balaji, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania who co-chaired the group Hindu Americans for Biden, agreed.
He’s an American-born child of a South Asian family, and a practicing Hindu. He said in Harris, with her Indian and Jamaican heritage, he sees “much of what this country has become in terms of cross-cultural and racial ties.”
But he added, “that history-making moment is really overshadowed by the daunting task ahead.”
He also names climate change as a chief concern, along with mounting COVID-19 deaths, “repairing institutions” post-Trump, and “a massive disinformation system that quite literally led to an insurrection.”
“Now the real work has begun,” he said. “In many ways, we are at war with ourselves.”
Immigration debate will be closely watched
In general, Asian American voters tend to vote for Democrats more often than Republicans. A poll of Asian American voters ahead of the election showed that only about 28% of Indian Americans, for instance, said they would vote for Trump.
But Southeast Asian Americans are still a huge, diverse and far from politically monolithic group.
Paresh Birla, who heads the nonpartisan Council of Indian Organizations in Greater Philadelphia, said when he’s coordinating with the many Indian groups in and around the city, he’s often balancing a lot of political priorities.
“Every community,” he said, “has their own personal vision for how things could be.”
People he has heard from tend to want a stronger bond between the U.S. and India, and Birla hopes the fact that Harris’s high-profile role might further that goal. Immigration, he said, is also top of mind.
Biden already announced that he intended to immediately begin working on immigration policy, and has previewed a plan that would create an eight-year path to citizenship for undocumented U.S. residents who were present in the U.S. on Jan 1.