American economist and social scientist Steven Durlauf stood up for Indian-origin scholar Soumita Shukla against anti-India hatred on social media. Soumitra Shukla, a research fellow at Harvard Business School's Artificial Intelligence Institute, made an observation on the increasing hatred targeting Indians on X but became a target himself as his post went viral and social media users asked him to leave the US. It was then that Durlauf said that the very presence of Shukla in the US shows why immigrants are crucial to American science and that he was ashamed of the un-American behavior that Shukla had to witness.
"The amount of anti-Indian hate on this platform is truly sickening. People need to stop worrying about jobs being "stolen" and look deeper within as to why they have such rotten souls to wish the worst on others," Shukla's first post that started the row read. His post was in reaction to the prevalent X narrative that Indians have been stealing jobs in the US.
