A single photograph from a University of Texas football game has touched off a Republican civil war over immigration, assimilation, and what it actually means to become American — with a Texas railroad commissioner nominee at the center of the storm.
According to The Federalist, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted an image over the weekend showing students who appeared to be of South Asian descent cheering in the stands at a UT game. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
The post drew immediate backlash from across the political spectrum. Sen. John Cornyn, a fellow Texas Republican, accused French of intolerance and racism, according to The Federalist, which described the senator and others as “RINOs” — Republicans in name only. Other critics argued the students were simply doing what Americans do: celebrating a dramatic Longhorns comeback win over then-top-ranked Ohio State.
“These Indians are literally assimilating into traditional American culture by celebrating the Texas comeback win over Ohio State,” one X user wrote. Another quipped that showing up to a college football game and cheering wildly when an underdog upsets the No. 1 team in the country is itself a marker of assimilation. A third said cheering in a UT shirt and a cowboy hat “looks a lot like assimilating.”
But The Federalist argues those rejoinders shut down a more substantive conversation. In a follow-up post, French framed the image as evidence of “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” according to the outlet.
A Question of Numbers and Culture
The demographic backdrop is real and changing quickly. Citing Axios, The Federalist notes there are more than 450,000 Indians living in Texas, nearly double the 2010 figure. Chron reported that the majority of that voting bloc is Hindu, with Muslim and Christian minorities, while Pew Research found that 48 percent of Indian Americans are Hindu, 8 percent Muslim, 8 percent Sikh and 15 percent Christian.
The Federalist’s argument goes well beyond the football stands. It contends that religion occupies a central role in assimilation, pointing to John Adams’ famous line that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The outlet frames the Founders’ Christianity as the soil in which American institutions grew, and warns that large-scale immigration from religious traditions far different from that foundation could alter the moral and civic framework that underpins those institutions — regardless of what immigrants wear or which teams they cheer for.
Central to the piece is a distinction between cultural participation and genuine incorporation. Tourists attend football games. Foreign exchange students attend football games. Some eat hot dogs, drink beer in the parking lot, watch Hollywood movies, celebrate the Fourth of July and go camping. None of that, the outlet argues, means they regard America as their nation or Americans as their fellow people.
Enclaves, Language and Parallel Societies
The Federalist points to Frisco, Texas, where, according to The Texas Monthly, Indian celebrations have grown “more vibrant and more public,” and where some newer Indian immigrants reportedly do not regularly interact with Americans of other races. One longtime resident, identified as Mom Roy, told the outlet she has had to remind newcomers to respect American culture and personal space, saying Indian culture is not the same as the “culture here.”
For The Federalist, that anecdote cuts two ways: it demonstrates assimilation happening in real time, but also raises the question of why the lesson was necessary at all. Ethnic clustering, in this view, allows immigrants to live in parallel societies where old habits and attachments are never really relinquished — a pattern the outlet says is visible in the students gathered together in a single section of the UT stands.
Those concerns extend beyond Texas. The piece revisits the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral race, where incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey reportedly benefited from Somali clan divisions: State Sen. Omar Fateh belongs to the Darod clan, while a large share of Minneapolis Somalis are Hawiye, and reporting indicated Hawiye voters may have withheld support from Fateh because of that rivalry.
Language, meanwhile, remains what the outlet calls another key measure. The writer describes walking Ditmars Boulevard in Queens, hoping to interview residents about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and finding people who dressed alike, carried the same phones and walked the same streets — yet could not hold a conversation in English. Several appeared to belong to the area’s long-standing Greek community, and the language barrier ended at least one interview, even with respondents who said they were citizens.
The Federalist’s conclusion is blunt: demographics do not stop changing because a viral photo gets condemned, and assimilation is not proven by a Longhorns shirt or a Saturday afternoon in the stands. The students in French’s photograph, clustered together, are offered as a small illustration of a much larger question about what the country is becoming — and whether anyone in either party is still willing to ask it out loud.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/15/assimilation-means-more-than-going-to-a-football-game/