American IT advocacy group launches campaign against ‘Indian IT mafia’

SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — With the Indian-American community on high alert after a multitude of shootings in recent days, an immigration reform advocacy website — which reportedly featured photos and videos of Indian families relaxing in America’s suburbs — has launched, arguing that immigrants in the U.S. on work visas are a threat to the country’s tech jobs.

The site, SaveAmericanITJobs.org, claims immigrants working in the U.S. on visas pose a threat to the common American tech worker. Created by 66-year-old Virginia computer programmer Steve Pushor, the site has been making its rounds on social media and has been shared extensively on WhatsApp.

“What we’re trying to point out is people in Ohio, IT workers and other professional people, have lost their jobs to foreign guest workers. That’s what our point is,” Pushor was quoted as saying by Buzzfeed. He said the site saw a new spike in traffic shortly after Kuchibhotla’s shooting, Pushor said he does not want Indians current living in the U.S. to leave, and does not advocate the use of violence.

Bhavin Bavalia, an American-born IT professional and the son of Indian immigrants, said he first came across the site when a friend shared it on Facebook “It’s very scary for me knowing that I have a lot of family in these small Indian communities,” he told Buzzfeed. “To think that there could be some weirdo filming my cousin’s kids as they’re playing at the park, and possibly fomenting resentment towards them, is just disturbing.”

The website features a multitude of content to back its cause, from a post on the “real life story of a highly skilled IT professional and his ordeal of job loss at Pacific Gas and Electric Company by an H-1B from India” to criticism of “Indian companies” and an “Indian IT mafia” that “have ignored or shoved aside American IT professionals for years.”

However, a PDF titled, “Ohio – A Journey To Indian Park,” features a video that several from the Indian-American community found troubling.

In the video — which has since been removed from the website — the narrator says the following: “The number of people from foreign countries blows my mind out here. You see this whole area is all Indian, amazing. It’s an amazing number of jobs have been taken away from Americans. The Indian crowd has ravished the Midwest. It’s crazy.”

Kalpesh Kapadia, the Indian-born chief executive of the California-based startup SelfScore, said Pushor’s website was the subject of discussion this week in at least five different WhatsApp groups.

Pramod Buravalli, the India-born CEO of a Houston IT firm, hosts a weekly podcast on Indian-American issues; he says his listeners have been asking whether their families are safe in the US, or whether they should go back to India. “They think maybe going to local bars is a no-no,” Buravalli told Buzzfeed. 

On his website, Pushor lists three organizations — the IEEE-USA, NumbersUSA, and Protecting US Workers — as “other advocates” in the immigration space.