But Indian Americans’ worries about discrimination may also look different than those of other groups because of their distinctive identity. A majority of Indians currently living in the U.S. arrived after 2000, and they’re more likely than other immigrant group to have arrived recently. H1-B visas, which are given to foreigners in “specialty occupations” like tech, are also awarded to Indians more frequently than any other group. In early March, the Trump administration suspended expedited processing of these visas, inspiring angst from Silicon Valley to India itself, where families often receive cash from their immigrant relatives in the United States.

Because of their high levels of education and professional status, Indian Americans have often been able to assimilate into their broader communities. Khanna’s family offers a perfect example: When they moved into his childhood neighborhood in Pennsylvania in the 1980s, he said, his family faced some suspicion from neighbors. “The concern was: ‘What’s going to happen to the Christmas candles out on the streets?’” he said. “So my parents put out the Christmas candles, enthusiastically, and we had some of the best Christmas lights on the street.” This wasn’t a way of giving in: “That was in no way seen as not being proud of being Hindu,” he said. But “there was a respect for the kind of cultural traditions of the street and the country.”

Of course, blending in with America’s majority culture has always been more of an option for Indian Americans who are wealthy and educated. “For every engineer, doctor, and software professional in the community who most likely joins the middle or upper class, there are domestic workers, gas-station attendants, taxi drivers, and construction workers who negotiate the social and economic realities of the United States very differently,” wrote Mishra in his recent book, Desis Divided. Upper-class Indian Americans may not identify significantly with marginalized groups: As Suri put it, “connection to other Americans who have brown skin color … [has] not meant a lot to me personally.” Poorer Indians, on the other hand, are much more likely to identify across lines of religion and national origin, Mishra argues. For example: The California organization South Asian Histories for All explicitly identifies as interfaith and “inter-caste,” and South Asian Americans Leading Together, or SAALT, advocates on behalf of people who are poor or immigrants.

Religious differences also make the Indian American experience distinctive. While there’s a lot of religious diversity among the group, which includes Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsis, most Indian Americans come from a Hindu background.

“There is one kind of approach within the Hindu American community which thinks that foregrounding Hindu identity or seeing themselves primarily as Hindu is the way to go” in the face of discrimination, said Mishra. “But there is an equally strong approach in the community that feels that they would not be safe.” That’s especially true now: Hindus increasingly “feel that they are also being targeted or seen as ‘the other,’ in many cases, as Muslims,” he said.