There is nothing more pathetic than the sudden, frantic realization of the 'model minority' that they are, in fact, still just a minority. The latest dispatch from the front lines of the crumbling American Dream comes via an Indian-origin immigration attorney who has issued a warning to the Indian diaspora in the United States: ‘Don’t make a mess.’ It is a fascinating bit of advice, delivered with the weary pragmatism of a veterinarian telling a golden retriever to sit still while the butcher sharpens his knives. The suggestion that one should simply ‘be careful’ implies that the current American political landscape is a rational machine that rewards compliance. It isn’t. It’s a woodchipper with a flag draped over it, and it doesn't care how high your H-1B salary is or how many degrees you’ve accumulated from institutions that are currently cannibalizing themselves.

The attorney’s warning is centered on the absolute necessity of maintaining perfect legal standing in an era where the administrative state is being weaponized by one side and abandoned by the other. The advice is simple: don’t get a DUI, don't get into a domestic spat, don't even look at a federal building sideways. It is a plea for invisibility. For years, the Indian diaspora has been the darling of the American corporate class—the high-skilled, tax-paying, law-abiding engine of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. They played the game by the rules, only to find that the rules were written in disappearing ink by a legislature that treats immigration reform like a hot potato made of plutonium. Now, with the political winds shifting toward a nativism so blunt it could be used as a blunt-force instrument, the ‘good immigrants’ are finding out that to a populist demagogue, a brown face is a brown face, regardless of whether it’s behind the wheel of a Tesla or a tattered lawnmower.

On the Right, we have the enthusiasts of the 'Great Purge,' people who view the complexity of global labor markets through the lens of a 1950s sitcom that never actually existed. To them, every visa holder is a job-stealing interloper, ignoring the fact that without this specific diaspora, the American tech sector would have the intellectual output of a damp sponge. They preach the gospel of 'merit-based' immigration while simultaneously salivating at the prospect of mass deportations that would inevitably ensnare the very people they claim to value. Their policy is a incoherent scream into the void, driven by a desperate need to find someone to blame for the fact that their own small-town economies are being hollowed out by the very corporations they refuse to regulate. They want the labor; they just don't want the humans attached to it.

On the Left, we find the equally nauseating spectacle of performative empathy. The Democrats will offer plenty of hashtags and tearful press conferences about the 'vibrant tapestry' of our nation, but when it comes to actually fixing the green card backlog—a purgatory that keeps hundreds of thousands of Indian nationals in a state of indentured servitude for decades—they are curiously impotent. They prefer the immigrant as a prop, a victim to be shielded for the cameras, rather than a constituent with actual rights. They talk about 'sanctuary' while presiding over a system that treats legal residents like disposable batteries. Their inaction is its own form of cruelty, a slow-motion bureaucratic execution that forces families to live in perpetual anxiety, waiting for a document that might never arrive while the clock of their children’s aging-out status ticks loudly in the background.

And so, the advice remains: ‘Don't make a mess.’ It is an admission of total surrender. It tells a community of millions that their only hope for survival is to be more perfect than the citizens who hate them. You must be the perfect worker, the perfect neighbor, the perfect silent ghost in the machinery of capitalism. Any slip, any human error, is now a pretext for expulsion. The attorney isn’t wrong; in a country that has lost its collective mind, the only defense is a low profile. But what a miserable existence it is to live in a house where you pay the most rent but aren't allowed to touch the thermostat. The American experiment has devolved into a reality show where the contestants are constantly being told to ‘stay in their lane’ while the road itself is being demolished. The diaspora is being told to be careful, but the truth is that no amount of care can save you when the building is already on fire and the firemen are busy arguing about who started it while clutching cans of gasoline.