Anti-Indian sentiment is on the rise in Frisco. Some blame right-wing influencers

On the east side of Frisco, Texas, an intricate Hindu temple sits where once there was a landscaping warehouse. Some days you can find people playing cricket on the field outside, and the city is dotted with restaurants boasting Indian fare.

None of this is particularly surprising when you consider that the 2026 population overview shows 33% of Frisco’s residents are Asian, many of those of Indian descent. But starting about a year ago, Frisco started making headlines for something else: a rise in U.S. anti-Indian sentiment.

Mark Dent, who has been writing about this issue for Texas Monthly, said it’s hard to pinpoint when this shift started.

“The Indian population has been growing in Frisco for about the past 15 or 20 years without a ton of public uproar or anything like that,” he said. “But around a year ago, you did start to see a lot more influencers and Republican politicians starting to become more involved, particularly speaking out against H-1B visas, and in some cases, the Indian American community in general.”

Dent said one early example was about a year ago, when a post on X, formerly Twitter, went viral from an anonymous account.

“The post showed a video of people shopping at Costco, many of whom appeared to be Indian Americans or immigrants, and suggesting that H-1Bs had led to the Great Replacement in Frisco,” he said. “And the Great Replacement theory is this theory that suggests that more white Christian Americans are being replaced by people from other countries.”

Dent said this sentiment took a lot of people in Frisco’s Indian community by surprise.

“Frisco has had a lot of immigrants coming in for many years. The [Hindu temple] …was first dedicated in 2008,” he said. “I talked a lot to people who had never faced any type of discrimination, that they felt, for their ethnicity or their race in their entire life, and all of a sudden they see these influencers getting hundreds of thousands of views speaking out against visas, speaking out against Indian Americans.”

This issue has also come up at City Council meetings, though Dent said some of the comments made at meetings have come from people who do not live locally.

“There’s been a couple [of meetings] where there have been hours of public comments, some of them defending Indian Americans in Frisco and some from people speaking out against them,” he said. “There are quite a few people who are from out of town, from other parts of Texas, in some cases other states. There are also some people who are from Frisco and are sharing those sentiments.”

After the first such City Council meeting in February, Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney spoke out against this attitude.

“Basically, he said that we are a diverse city and we are unified. There was a runoff election, and Rod Vilhauer was a candidate who had said some anti-immigrant comments on a podcast, and he ended up losing that election,” Dent said. “So some people saw that as a sign that Frisco was more willing to go for more of unite people, diverse candidate, and that this would be a good sign for the future.”

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