Days after the fatal shooting of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, who is an Indian-born engineer, a anti-immigration website which features the photos and videos of Indian families relaxing in the city of Columbus, Ohio, has alarmed the community members in United States. A post on the website SaveAmericanITJobs.com called ‘Welcome to Columbus Ohio suburbs - Lets take a walk to Indian park’ features a video of the Indian families hanging out in a public park in the suburban Ohio. The video’s description mentions how wealthy Indians have ‘moved in’ to the suburban homes in Ohio as “displacement of Americans has occurred”. As of March 6th, the video has over 41,000 views on the YouTube.
A Buzzfeed report said that the website is created and maintained by Steve Pushor, a 66-year-old computer programmer from the Virginia. In the video, Pushor’s camera pans over the people playing volleyball and children riding bikes, as he narrates: Number of people from the foreign countries blows my mind out here. You see this whole area is all Indian and amazing. It is an amazing number of jobs have been taken away from Americans. The Indian crowd has ravished the Midwest. It is a takeover. Pushor sarcastically describes the park as a “mini Mumbai”.
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Pushor initially posted this video and the accompanying document called ‘Ohio - A Journey To Indian Park’ in the August. The document labels India as the “hell hole” and highlights the loss of “Norman Rockwell white people class” in the U.S. A link to the document now directs to the 403-error page, but an archived version of the document are still available online. The recent shooting of Kuchibhotla and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the Trump government has caused the video and document to resurface on the Facebook posts, forums and also on WhatsApp groups of the Indian immigrants in U.S.
Bhavin Bavalia, a US-born IT professional and son of the Indian immigrants, said that he came across the site and the video when a friend of his shared it on Facebook. Talking to the Buzzfeed news, Bavalia said that, “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.”
Mrudula Duddempudi.
