[...] the unparalleled success of South Asian immigrants is largely the consequence of a famous peculiarity in subcontinental emigration: a quota system that tended to favor professionals has made the drain from South Asia (chiefly India) almost entirely brain. Both education and capital emigrated to America (though they frequently flew back home to visit); this has meant that the brown people who arrived here were not even very brown in their mother countries. They were often high-caste (if not upper-class) Hindus fluent in English. Unless they were Punjabis whose world had been scythed by Partition, they barely registered the passions and arguments of the independence struggle, knowing only the misery of the subcontinental poverty they had to escape. When they left India, the immigrants fled politics as well as joblessness. When they arrived in cold war–era America, they were prepared to play it safe.