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Notes -
As @porkpiehat points out, this picture is hardly representative of Texas demographics as a whole, nor do I think it represents some canary-in-the-coal-mine for mass immigration into the state. It is far more indicative of the fact that the University of Texas has become a good school. It has a competitive admissions rate that is only getting more competitive and recent rankings indicate it is well-within the top 50 colleges in the United States.
What does this have to do with Indians? I'm sure you can guess where I'm going with this. Indian immigrants to America tend to be wealthy and predominantly come from the upper castes of Indian society. They, much like other Asian groups, tend to perform better than comparable white students, and as far as I can tell, there is a strong cultural emphasis on academic and material success among recent Indian immigrants, resulting in them being more likely to travel out of state for college. All this amounts to the fact that they will be drawn to a strong academic program like UT. UT, in turn, wanting to have the strongest academic class, will admit relatively more Asian students, as most colleges these days tend to for the aforementioned performance reasons. Thus, more Indians at the University of Texas - estimates on U.S. News suggest 25% of the student body is Asian. I doubt most of these students remain in Texas, though perhaps they stick around Austin for a time for their first jobs. Hardly some mass migration ploy. These are skilled and intelligent students who are assimilating as best they can, seemingly successfully if they're at a football game having a great time.
Let's look at the University of Alabama for comparison. Alabama is a similar flagship state university, but it lacks the academic pedigree of UT. To no surprise, its demographic profile is more akin to the rest of the country: 67% White, 1.5% Asian, which is actually lower than Alabama's 1.8% Asian population.
A huge chunk of these students are employed in Dallas or Houston- Texas is not a few oil rigs with cattle wandering between them, after all, it has a huge white collar services sector that employs more college grads than it can produce.
UT Austin admissions are also, like most state flagship schools, non-meritocratic in a non-racialized direction- substantial preference for in-state applicants. This manifests itself, in the specific local case, as autoadmit for top six percent of the class at all Texas public schools, surely a much more dot Indian group than the state as a whole(also much whiter and more asian). The losers from that policy are mostly hispanics, who are underrepresented among top six percent students(blacks also don't benefit from that policy, but 'wholistic admissions' benefits them in practice, so this is probably made up for with non-autoadmit spots, at least partially). And indeed, we see lower ranked UT schools with very very hispanic campuses.
The argument in favor of the "top
tensixfive percent" rule was that high schools were heavily segregated in practice --- barely now within living memory, by fiat, but now mostly by school zoning area demographics. Ideally the winners are supposed to be poor schools in the Rio Grande Valley and historically-Black communities getting to send graduates from poorly-ranked high schools to top-tier UT Austin, but I've definitely read anecdotes of parents of means, uh, venue shopping come senior year of high school. I can't speak to how common that is, though.Lol, the winners are strivers at semirural schools. The innercity kids and valley tejanos fail out their first year and get replaced with Catholic school alums that transfer from commuter schools with a specific program for this.
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