The "Patel Motel Cartel"—And The DEI Loans That Displaced Heritage Americans From The Motel Industry

Representatives of the Asian (as in Indian, not Chinese) American Hotel Owner’s Association lobbying group

Recently an Indian-American named Patel tweeted this:

There are, according to him, 40,000 members of his specific caste (Leuva Patidar Samaj) in the US, and he says

Everyone from a part of Gujarat and same way of life in the US Literally everyone here owns a motel or gas station in rural America.

This is not an accident—this is called the “Patel Motel Cartel” from a 1999 NY Times magazine article by Tunku Varadjaran.

A Patel Motel Cartel?, July 4, 1999

The subhead of A Patel Motel Cartel?—note the question mark—was:

No, but you might think so if you've stayed in a motel lately. More than half of American motels are now owned by Indians, mostly from a specific subcaste.

Didn’t American motels used to be owned by, you know, Americans? What happened.

There are two factors.

1. Ethnic specialization: the caste they’re a member of (mostly with the last name Patel) have been innkeepers and businessmen in India for centuries. There are a total of 150K Patels in the US—the 40K above is a subcaste of a subcaste.

2. DEI/Affirmative Action/Minority preference loans: The SBA lends hundreds of millions of dollars, up to $5 million at a time, to minority entrepreneurs—including Indian-Americans, who have NEVER been officially discriminated against.

Most of them arrived in America after the Immigration Act of 1965, which was passed one year AFTER the Civil Rights Act made all official discrimination against minorities illegal.

But that same year, President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the 1965 Immigration Act, made a famous and consequential speech at Howard University, which is credited with the birth of Affirmative Action—conscious discrimination in favor of blacks, and against whites.

In The American Scholar, William M. Chace (who likes affirmative action) writes:

In his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, President Lyndon Johnson declared, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” The affirmative-action approach President Johnson proposed in that speech was to be a moral and policy response to the losses, both material and psychological, suffered by African Americans during and after the time of slavery: “We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” Johnson’s speech was followed in 1965 by executive orders aiming “to correct the effects of past and present discrimination.”

Affirmative Inaction

Opposition to affirmative action has drastically reduced minority enrollment at public universities; private institutions have the power and the responsibility to reverse the trend

By William M. Chace, December 1, 2011

But in 1965, there were almost no Patels in America to be discriminated against.

But if you go to, say, the National Minority Supplier Development Council website, and click through to see who gets to call himself a Minority Business Entrepreneur, one of the photos is this guy:

In a January 30, 2002 article called Why Not Just Give Them A Roomful Of Gold? Or: Immigration – Just Another Government Program for VDARE.com, I wrote

But what about the much-publicized virtuous immigrants – who get jobs, start businesses, own homes etc. etc.?

Well, it turns out that the government is subsidizing them too. Recently, I found an email in my inbox saying that the reason so many small motels are owned by Indian immigrants named Patel (click here for a PDF report on the business drawbacks of this form of immigrant enterprise) was because the US government was financing them. I didn’t believe it. I cynically assumed it was some kind of legend, made up by people who don`t like immigrants.

I should have been more careful where I pointed my cynicism. I should have kept it aimed at the US Government, where it belongs.

I quoted a a 1995 Forbes story about Hospitality Franchise Systems by Joel Millman, in which Millman, who was enthusiastic about this phenomenon wrote:

Nor were the immigrants shy about cashing in on U.S. affirmative action programs. Though in no sense disadvantaged, Patels qualified as a "minority" and tapped below-prime financing offered by the Small Business Administration. [Emphasis added]

Imported Entrepreneurs, Forbes, November 6, 1995

When Indian-American journalist Tunku Varadjaran wrote his Patel Motel Cartel article in 1999, he said that “More than half of American motels” were owned by Indian. The most recent figure is 60 percent, or three-fifths.

Accounting for 34,260 hotels across the United States, Indian Americans owned hotels account for 60 percent of all hotels in the U.S., according to a new study conducted by Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) in partnership with Oxford Economics, a global leader in forecasting and quantitative analysis. The study analyzed the share of U.S. hotels and rooms owned by the members of AAHOA, which is predominantly made up of Indian-origin hoteliers, hotel operations, hotel guest ancillary spending, capital investment, and indirect and induced impacts supported by AAHOA hotels in other parts of the U.S. economy.

Indian-Americans Own 60 Percent Of Hotel Industry In U.S.

By Ajay Ghosh, TheUNN.com, August 10, 2021

As you can see, this study was paid for by the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (Asian here means Indian, not Chinese)—the kind of ethnically exclusive association that whites are simply not allowed to form.

So American motels went from 100 percent American-owned to at most 40 percent American-owned since 1965—and your taxes paid for it.