American Dream is broken: congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti

For those who don’t know you, who is Saikat Chakraborty? What is he about?

I grew up in Texas to immigrant parents from India. And when I first came out to San Francisco, I worked in the tech industry. And at the time, I was sort of driven by trying to see what tech could do to actually solve a lot of humanity’s biggest problems. I was part of that era of the technology industry. And after working here for a few years and seeing really how the cost of living crisis was affecting my neighbours all around San Francisco, I realised that there are bigger problems facing our society that I just wasn’t tackling. And I ended up quitting the tech industry. At the time, I remember literally writing a list. I said I wanted to work on inequality, poverty, and climate change. And at the time, the only person I really heard talking about that stuff in a serious way was (senator) Bernie Sanders. So that’s how I ended up joining the Bernie Sanders campaign and working in progressive politics.

How much of this comes from your family and your background?

A lot of it does come from my parents’ story and my father’s story, especially. My parents immigrated here in the 1970s, and they grew up quite poor in India, especially my father. He was a refugee because of the partition back then. And he grew up struggling with his family of 12 in this one-bedroom apartment, often having no idea where his next meal would come from. But he took the big risk to come to America with literally $8 in his pocket because he knew he would be able to provide a better life for his family.

And, growing up my entire childhood, I still saw him sacrifice. He would save every extra dollar to give back to our family and our neighbours in India or to help our Bengali community in Texas. It was a great opportunity for him to give back, and it was his moral duty to give back to his community. And so that’s sort of how I feel in a way. I came to tech, and I did end up making a lot of money by working early at this company, Stripe. I felt that it was my duty to try to do what I could to fix what I felt like is a broken economic system. Because at the end of the day, working people in this country have been working longer and longer hours to afford less and less. You know, the American dream that my father was able to achieve, that’s become farther and farther out of reach for most people. And I feel that I have to do everything I can to fix the system, because that’s what my dad would do.

You have described yourself as a change candidate? What exactly has gone wrong in America over the last 10 years? And what is it you’re looking to fix?

The thing that’s been going wrong in America predates the last 10 years. Because if you actually look at the wages of working people in this country, they’ve been largely stagnant for almost 40 to 50 years, while the cost of the essentials has been skyrocketing. The whole American Dream that I was talking about, that my dad was able to achieve, the idea there was that your children are going to do better than you. And that contract has been broken. That’s no longer the case. Young people today are not going to do as well as their parents. So the thing that’s really broken is the economic system. And because the economic system has been broken, that’s downstream from politics that’s been broken. Because for decades, we’ve had a politics that’s been getting bought out by very wealthy people, by billionaires, by corporations, who essentially took control of our government and redirected it towards their own needs.

So when you have a government that’s not working to make people’s lives better, then people start voting for anybody who’s pitching sweeping, bold change. And that’s really been happening ever since the Great Recession. I’d say the Great Recession was really the big wake-up call. And so after that, you had (former President) Barack Obama, who ran on bold, sweeping economic change, and then he got elected. But he wasn’t able to. He did a lot of good stuff, but he wasn’t able to fully turn the whole system around. And then, as a result of that, you had (President) Donald Trump running on bold, sweeping change in 2016. And then he gets elected. (Former President) Joe Biden ran in opposition to Trump, pitching the same thing. So he gets elected. And then Trump again in 2024. So what this shows me is that people in America are actually quite open to the kind of change being pitched. What they know, though, is that the system as it is right now is not working.

And if we can’t turn that around, if we can’t use democracy to make people’s lives better, then people are going to keep voting for people like Donald Trump, who are these, you know, authoritarians, essentially, who come into power saying, I alone can fix it. If we just kick out all the immigrants, if we kick out all the brown people, stop paying attention to other countries, then all of a sudden our problems will get solved.

This midterm election that’s going to happen in November is being framed as a referendum on Donald Trump and his presidency. Your view of Donald Trump, what he stands for?

So Donald Trump came in, and he was pitching one vision of a solution to the real economic concerns people have. He was saying that your house is too expensive, you can’t get a good job because America is spending too much money on immigrants and on other countries. And if he got elected, he was promising that he would make your life affordable, that he would get rid of all the corruption in Washington, DC, and that he would stop all of our wasteful spending on endless wars abroad. That’s what he campaigned on.

But what we’ve seen Donald Trump coming in and doing is that he has followed through on kicking out the immigrants, but it hasn’t made anybody’s lives affordable. In fact, the cost of living has gone up under Donald Trump. At the same time, corruption in Washington, DC, which was always there, skyrocketed. Now you’re seeing, you know, foreign governments literally buying up crypto coins that Donald Trump is issuing in exchange for favourable trade benefits.

And of course, he’s started a whole new war in the West Asia, and he’s potentially dragging our entire world into a kind of dystopia, you know, potentially dragging us into World War III. So, I do believe that 2026 is going to be a referendum on Donald Trump. I believe a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump didn’t do so necessarily because they believe in the specific solutions he was pitching. They were just doing so because people are desperate for change, and people were willing to accept any potential solution that seemed big enough to solve the problems.

But Donald Trump will have proved, and he’s proven so far, to have completely failed on all of his promises. And so I think there’s going to be a huge backlash. Now, the important thing for Democrats to do in this moment is not just say, we’re the anti-Trump party, we’ll go back to what we had before Donald Trump, because what we had before

Donald Trump is what led to Donald Trump. We have to actually pitch a vision for something new. How do we build a new economy that will truly make your lives better? That has to be at the centrepiece of the Democratic agenda.

You’ve often been compared to Zohran Mamdani comparison because of your progressive policies and your social media savvy. What do you think about the comparison?

Look, I love what Zohran’s doing in New York because to me, the kind of politics I’m describing, where we take control back of the country from the corporate interests and those who hijacked our government, is going to require a massive movement of people who wrest that control back. It’s going to require tons of candidates who are winning all over the country who are willing to step up and challenge a broken status quo. And Zohran proved that in New York. And by him doing it, it makes what I’m trying to do easier, because at the end of the day, you know, this is the kind of thing where if people believe it’s possible, then it becomes possible. So I want as many people to be a part of this as possible, to be a part of this movement, and I would love to be a part of the same movement that Zohran’s a part of. So, the more of us, the merrier is how I see it.

Indian-Americans are worried about a rising tide of racist attacks, often coming from people who align themselves with President Trump and the MAGA agenda. What do they tell you about that?

I don’t see it in person. What you see online is often a bunch of cowards who are willing to hide behind their anonymous user names on Twitter, pointing all kinds of vitriol and hate. Of course, I don’t like it. I dislike that we’ve come to a place in American discourse where that’s even okay. Of course, it comes top down. They do it because they’re empowered by Donald Trump and the people in power who are willing to call immigrants all kinds of terrible names and call them filth.

I think we are going to have to have a real reckoning in this country where there needs to be a complete cultural shift of making that kind of language and that kind of hate unacceptable again, because that’s what it used to be. But I’d say I’m lucky to be campaigning in San Francisco, which is a very accepting and inclusive city. I get tons of support on the campaign trail from folks, no matter what their race. But I’m seeing it from other members of the South Asian community who, again, mostly face this kind of hatred online.

And I think for a lot of South Asian immigrants in this country, especially South Asian immigrants who came later on, who came as doctors or engineers, more professional immigrants who, for a long time, felt that they were perhaps immune to the kind of hatred that other immigrant groups faced. I think right now has been a real wake-up call to see it under Donald Trump’s second administration that, no, it doesn’t matter your class, your status, your wealth, this kind of racist immigrant hatred comes for all of us.

We’ve seen restrictions on a number of immigration pathways from people around the world, including India. Has America just become less welcoming?

I think there is definitely a sense that America has become less welcoming because at the top levels of government, it has become less welcoming. And I do want to say, though, that most people in America are still quite pro-immigrant, and I really do think the whole system can turn around. I think back to when my parents came to this country. We were actually begging immigrants to come from all around the world. We had immigration offices all over the world that were recruiting immigrants. That’s how my dad got here.

A friend of my dad’s took him to an immigration office in Calcutta, where this staffer pitched him on the American Dream and got him to apply for a visa right there on the spot. And then he got the visa a couple of years later. In that era, we just had decades of wages going up and living standards going up in this country. We had just put a man on the moon. We had built the interstate highway system. And I think it’s no coincidence that America has taken this anti-immigrant turn at the same time that the economic situation for working people has also taken a downturn.

We have to create an America that is growing, that’s optimistic, that’s building an economy that’s better and better for everybody in order to create a long-term sustainable immigration process where we’re welcoming people from all over the world. We have to become a country that welcomes immigrants again. And we have to make it much easier to go through the H-1B process.

Anyone who’s gone through the immigration process to come here legally knows it’s a harrowing experience with all kinds of weird twists and turns. And you don’t follow one small rule, and five years of work can get thrown out the window. That has to be completely changed. And the H-1B visa needs to be reformed so that once you do get here, you have more freedom. You shouldn’t be tied to just one company. And the wages should be way higher. We should make sure that immigrants coming here are pushing up wages for everybody.

Is India and the US-India relationship going to be a priority if you get to Congress?

I’m definitely going to join the India Caucus. And, I do want to have a say in our relations with India because I do believe we’re in a world now where countries like India and China are major superpowers in the world, and America needs to start treating these countries with respect and treating their sovereignty with respect. And, you know, I’d like to be a part of the diplomatic efforts to make sure that we have long lasting good relations with our neighbours in India, but really anywhere. But I believe I have a special role to play when it comes to India because of my background, my heritage.