Immigrant and Nationalist: Indian Diaspora Twitter Supporters of Brexit and Trump

The rise of the populist radical right in Europe and North America, as well as in countries such as India, the Philippines, Brazil, and Turkey, focuses us to evaluate its impact as a global phenomenon. As such, this paper situates the role of diaspora and migrant networks as a means of exploring transnational dynamics of the populist radical right in an era of digital hyperconnectivity. It examines how Indian diaspora supporters of Brexit and Trump in the UK and US not only promote populist radical right ideology in the form of long-distance nationalism towards India, but also within their countries of settlement. By employing a mixed methods approach that includes qualitative analysis (using digital ethnography) with quantitative computational methods (using network analysis and corpus linguistics), it analyses how Indian diaspora Twitter users express issues of concern pertinent to the populist radical right as well as explores how their interactions on the platform shape online identities. This paper finds that Indian diaspora Twitter users circulate populist radical right narratives and tropes—e.g. immigration, Islam, the political and media establishment—within the Brexit and Trump Twittersphere(s). Overall, it sheds light on why and how ethnic minorities and/or immigrants support populist radical right agendas in Western liberal democracies.