Political Analysis

Ro Khanna's America: A California Dream Destroyed

Santa Clara County was 82% Caucasian in 1970. It is 28% Caucasian today. The H-1B program built the workforce; chain migration built the electorate; CA-17 elects a Bernie Sanders co-chair with 68% of the vote.

Jun 26, 2026·14 min read

Apple Park in Cupertino, California.Daniel L. Lu, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Key Findings

California's 17th Congressional District is 57% Asian and 20% Caucasian. The median household income is $182,000 - the highest of any district in the country. It voted 68% Democratic in 2024 and re-elected Ro Khanna, who co-chaired Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign.
Santa Clara County, the geographic core of CA-17, was 82% Caucasian in 1970. It was 28% Caucasian in 2024. The Asian share rose from 3% to 39% over the same 54 years. 63% of households in CA-17 speak a non-English language at home.
66% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born, up from 30% in 1990. The single largest source country is India at 23%, followed by China at 18%. The H-1B visa program, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, supplied the labor pipeline.
Every 1-percentage-point increase in a district's non-citizen adult population corresponds to a 1.8-point increase in Democratic vote share. All Asian-majority congressional districts in the United States elect Democrats.

On March 22, 2025, Ro Khanna spoke at the McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was the first sitting California Democrat to address the New Hampshire party in the 2028 cycle. His first-quarter Federal Election Commission filing, posted three weeks later, showed $3.6 million raised in 90 days. His cash on hand was $13.4 million.^[1]

Khanna's congressional district, California's 17th, has a median household income of $182,000. It is the wealthiest congressional district in the United States.^[2] In 2024 it gave Khanna 68.4% of the vote against Republican Anita Chen, who received 82,400 votes.^[3]

The district is 57% Asian and 20% Caucasian. It is the most Asian congressional district in the country.^[2]

Santa Clara County, 1970 to 2024

Santa Clara County is the geographic core of CA-17. The Census Bureau began tracking county-level race in detail in 1970. The trajectory since:

Year	Caucasian	Asian	Hispanic
1970	82%	3%	13%
1990	59%	17%	20%
2000	46%	24%	23%
2010	37%	30%	26%
2024	28%	39%	25%

Source: Silicon Valley Indicators, 1970-2024.^[4]

The Caucasian share fell 54 percentage points in 54 years. The Asian share grew thirteen-fold. By 2010, Asians had passed Caucasians as the largest racial group in the county.

The Indian-born population alone is 148,000, or 8% of the county. That figure counts foreign-born only; the total Indian-American population including U.S.-born children is roughly twice that. In Cupertino, 22.6% of residents are Indian-American. In Fremont, 18%. In Sunnyvale, 15.5%.^[5]

San Jose, the largest city in the metro, was 75.7% Caucasian in 1970. By 2010 it was 28.7%. A 47-point drop over four decades.^[6]

The Workforce Pipeline

The mechanism is the H-1B visa, signed into law as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 and first issued in October 1991.

In 1990, 30% of Silicon Valley tech workers were foreign-born. By 1993, 23% of foreign-born engineers in the Bay Area were from India. 87% of Indians working in Silicon Valley had arrived since 1970.^[7]

In March 2025, the Spokesman-Review published the most recent count: 66% of Silicon Valley tech workers were foreign-born. The top source countries were India at 23% and China at 18%. Only 17% of the technical workforce was born in California.^[8]

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received 470,300 H-1B registrations for the 2024 cycle. The annual cap is 85,000. The program processes roughly five times as many applications as it admits, and roughly half of admitted applicants work in the Bay Area.^[9]

Each H-1B worker who completes the green-card transition gains the right to petition for spouses, parents, and adult siblings. The Nation of Settlers has documented this multiplier elsewhere: one principal admission becomes, on average, 3.45 chain admissions over the following decade.^[10]

The labor pipeline produced the electorate.

Who Khanna Is

Rohit Khanna was born in Philadelphia in 1976. His parents emigrated from Punjab, India in 1968. His maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, was an associate of Jawaharlal Nehru and spent two years in British colonial prison during the Indian independence movement.^[11]

Khanna studied economics at the University of Chicago and law at Yale. President Obama appointed him Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce in 2009. He was elected to Congress from CA-17 in 2016 after defeating eight-term incumbent Mike Honda in a Democrat-versus-Democrat general election under California's top-two primary system.

His voting record:

Co-chair of Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign.
Public supporter of Medicare for All since 2017.
Co-sponsor of the Green New Deal resolution; signatory to the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.
Co-sponsor of the College for All Act with Sanders.
Member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Heritage Action scorecard: 0%.^[12]
GovTrack ranks him the 67th most left-wing member of the House for the 2024 session.^[13]

On immigration, Khanna has described the United States as "a magnet for the world's talent." He opposed the Trump administration's H-1B fee increases in 2020 and again in 2025. He has called immigration enforcement at the southern border "anti-immigrant."^[14]

The 95,000

CA-17 contains roughly 95,000 registered Republicans. Anita Chen, the 2024 Republican nominee, received 82,400 votes. The district has been rated D+21 by the Cook Political Report since 2022.^[3]

A Republican cannot win the general election. The general election is decided in the Democratic primary, where the median voter is to the left of the national Democratic median. The Republican vote in CA-17 has no representational consequence.

The chair of the Santa Clara County Republican Party, Shane Patrick Connolly, told San Jose Spotlight in 2019 that "it's easier to be gay than it is to be conservative in Silicon Valley." A 2017 CNN Money investigation interviewed Google engineers who described their political views as "undercover" inside the company.^[16] In the 2016 election, Google and Alphabet employees gave about $1.6 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign and $23,300 to Donald Trump's, a ratio of roughly seventy to one.^[15]^[17]

What the Income Number Hides

The standard explanation for progressive politics is economic distress. Voters with low incomes vote Democratic; voters with high incomes vote Republican. The pattern has held in American politics since the New Deal.

CA-17 breaks the pattern.

The median household earns $182,000. The median home value is $1.6 million. Household financial security is the highest in the country. The voting pattern is more progressive than Manhattan's.

The pattern repeats nationally. Democrats now represent 79 of America's 100 wealthiest congressional districts, up from 50 a decade ago. All 15 of America's wealthiest congressional districts elected Democrats in 2024. The lone near-exception is NY-3 on Long Island, which voted for Trump 51-47 in 2024 and is 71% Caucasian.^[18]^[19]

The Center for Immigration Studies has measured the relationship statistically. Every 1-percentage-point increase in a district's non-citizen adult population corresponds to a 1.8-point increase in Democratic vote share.^[20]

Twenty of the 24 congressional districts where one in five adults is a non-citizen elected a Democrat in 2022. All Asian-majority congressional districts in the United States elect Democrats.^[20]

The voting bloc is not formed by economics. It is formed by demographic origin.

What Was Lost

The 2024 Apple Park employee count is approximately 12,000. The campus sits on 175 acres in Cupertino that, in 1970, housed the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard's electronics measurement division. The land was farmland before that. Apricot orchards covered most of the Santa Clara Valley until the 1960s, when the orchards were paved over for tract housing.^[21]

The tract housing built in the 1960s sold for $25,000 to $35,000. A teacher with a single income could buy a 1,500-square-foot ranch house in Sunnyvale and walk to the elementary school where he taught.

In 2024, the median home in Cupertino sold for $3.4 million. The median home in Sunnyvale sold for $1.95 million. A teacher in the Cupertino Union School District earns a starting salary of $61,000 and a top salary of $113,000. The math does not produce homeownership.^[22]

Teachers, firefighters, nurses, and small-business owners have left Santa Clara County in measurable numbers since 2010. The county's domestic out-migration was 158,000 between 2010 and 2020. Foreign-born in-migration of 145,000 over the same decade replaced the loss in raw headcount but not in occupational composition. The new arrivals are concentrated in software engineering and finance.^[23]

The cultural footprint shifted in parallel. 63% of households in CA-17 speak a non-English language at home. The most common are Chinese at 16.7% of households, Spanish at 10.9%, and Hindi at 5.5%. The City of Cupertino now publishes municipal documents in three languages and provides translation services in a fourth.^[2]

The 2028 Lane

Khanna's $13.4 million war chest is the largest of any sitting House Democrat exploring a 2028 run. He has visited New Hampshire twice in 2025 and Iowa once. His public messaging combines two themes that polled poorly in 2020 but better in 2024: industrial policy aimed at manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, and expanded legal immigration aimed at high-skilled labor.^[1]

Asian-American eligible voters reached 15 million in 2024, up from 11.4 million in 2018. The fastest growth is in Nevada, Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina - all 2028 swing states. Asian-American turnout in 2024 was 60%, up from 49% in 2016. Asian-American voters favored the Democratic candidate by 19 points in 2024, down from 26 points in 2020 but still a structural Democratic advantage.^[24]

A Khanna candidacy targets that growth bloc directly. The progressive lane in the 2028 primary will likely include Khanna, Pete Buttigieg, and one or more state-level officials. Of those, Khanna is the only candidate from a majority-Asian district and the only candidate whose own biography matches the demographic the campaign would mobilize.

What CA-17 Means

The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Immigration Act of 1990 in March, May, and June of that year. The bill's principal author, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, told committee members that the legislation would "open the front door wider to skilled immigrants" while preserving family reunification. The committee report projected the new system would admit roughly 700,000 immigrants per year, up from the existing cap of 270,000.^[25]

The actual outcome over the following 35 years included roughly 40 million net new immigrants, nearly 1 million per year, plus 20 million U.S.-born children. The Bay Area absorbed a disproportionate share. Santa Clara County alone received 580,000 net foreign-born additions, a number larger than the entire 1970 county population of any racial composition.^[26]

The political result followed the demographic one. CA-17 went from a Republican-leaning district through 1992 to a competitive Democratic district through 2008 to a D+21 lock by 2022. The transition tracks the foreign-born share of the electorate at a roughly 1.5-percentage-point lag.^[20]

The Nation of Settlers' policy position on the structural drivers is unchanged from prior reporting:

End the H-1B visa as currently structured. Replace it with a narrow exceptional-skill visa with a cap below 10,000 per year and a salary floor above the 95th percentile of the relevant U.S. occupation.
Reduce overall legal immigration by at least 50% from current levels. Restore the pre-1990 trajectory.
Eliminate chain migration for adult siblings, parents, and adult children. Restrict family reunification to spouses and minor children.
Require advanced English proficiency for permanent residency.
End the Diversity Visa lottery.

CA-17 is the most extreme outcome of 35 years of unrestricted high-skilled immigration. It is also the model that other metros - Seattle's Eastside, suburban Washington DC, suburban Atlanta - are currently tracking with a 10-to-15-year lag. The pattern reproduces wherever the demographic threshold is crossed.