It’s no secret that xenophobia has gotten out of hand since our current administration took office, and it has been especially rampant in Texas.
Just this month, a Texas politician made a series of racist social media posts targeting UT Austin students. Bo French, the Republican nominee for a statewide position regulating Texas’ oil and gas industry, posted a photo of UT students cheering at a football game. The students in the photo being largely South Asian prompted French to claim that Americans are being displaced by “foreigners.”
This comes on the heels of months of similar rhetoric from politicians and community members. At city council meetings held in Frisco earlier this year, speakers repeatedly accused the city’s Indian community of an “invasion” or “takeover,” with claims involving H-1B visas, immigration and Indian Americans supposedly displacing Americans from jobs.
Bo French’s post has drawn widespread and bipartisan criticism. But when elected officials and community leaders portray immigrants and people of color as threats, those messages can shape how South Asians and other minority communities are treated in schools, workplaces and public spaces. The question is no longer whether this rhetoric exists in Dallas; it is whether we are willing to recognize the real-world consequences of allowing it to become normalized. And institutions have a responsibility to prevent that rhetoric from translating into unequal treatment.
This past summer, the South Asian dance community became another target of these racist narratives. KERA reported that several Dallas-based dancers of South Asian descent began receiving racist comments on their social media accounts earlier in the year. The comments included racial slurs and stereotypes such as accusations that Indians were “visa fraud” beneficiaries and were taking American jobs. Some dancers were also subjected to false claims about their citizenship and attempts to expose their personal information online.
Another alarming incident took place this year at a Plano City Council meeting. Internet personality Alex Stein showed up to the meeting wearing clothing and makeup intended to portray an exaggerated Indian character. He spoke in a stereotypical fake Indian accent and mocked Hindu religious traditions. Hindus for Human Rights subsequently sent an open letter to Plano’s mayor and City Council arguing that the incident reduced Indian and Hindu identity to racial and religious stereotypes.
As many recent grads living in Dallas can confirm, it’s an unfortunate reality that this racial hostility might also follow you into the workplace. I personally had a jarring experience earlier this year, which I think serves as a cautionary tale about the concrete impact of this discriminatory rhetoric. Towards the end of 2025, I started working for an HOA management company that managed a residential community called The Tribute, an affluent and majority-white neighborhood located in The Colony. For the next several months, I worked tirelessly in this new role and only ever received positive feedback from the team on my performance.
One morning, an executive came to visit unannounced and following that visit, my manager suddenly called me into his office. He explained that “the board” had been unsatisfied with my performance for the last few weeks and decided to terminate my employment, furthermore asking me to leave immediately. Feeling very blindsided, I politely asked for feedback on what the issue was, but I kept getting shut down by both the manager and the executive. Over the next two weeks, I reached out to HR to try to get some answers, but they were just as dismissive.
This job had required me to travel between The Colony, Little Elm and Frisco. As mentioned before, the Frisco area in particular has seen growing tensions and hostility towards immigrants and people of color. The fact that I was the only South Asian and Muslim American employee working for a politically conservative neighborhood — and that the employees who held the position before and after me were white women — made this experience especially difficult to process. I cannot say with certainty that my identity played a role in the decision, but the absence of any meaningful explanation left me questioning whether it did.
This conversation is especially urgent right now because these are not isolated incidents happening somewhere far away. They are happening in our own communities, at our city council meetings, in our schools and universities, and increasingly in our workplaces. Frisco has spent much of this year grappling with public speakers portraying its Indian American community as an “invasion” or “takeover,” while Texas political candidates have brought similar rhetoric onto the national stage during a crucial election season. At a time when the Dallas-Fort Worth area is becoming increasingly diverse, we have to ask what kind of community we want to build.
South Asians, immigrants and people of color should not have to worry about whether their skin color or citizenship status will determine how they are treated at work, at school or in their own neighborhoods. Dallas students and residents have a responsibility to make sure belonging isn’t determined by race, religion or national origin.
Since his post, Bo French has doubled down on his openly racist comments. If you are disturbed by this rhetoric, don’t simply scroll past it. Contact his campaign and show him that Texans will not stand to be divided or demeaned by his xenophobic narrative.
And if you as a UTD student witness or experience discrimination, speak up and report it. Hold those in power accountable and prove that our community cannot be silenced.