Turban Tide and Hindoo Invasion

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The Turban Tide, equally referred to as the Hindoo Invasion, was a xenophobic perception of a mass immigration from the Indian subcontinent to the US during the late 19th century. Although "Hindu" is the correct spelling, the spelling "Hindoo" was popular at the time.

By the late 19th century, fear had already begun in North America over Chinese immigration supplying cheap labor to lay railroad tracks, mostly in California and elsewhere in the West Coast. In xenophobic jargon common in the day, ordinary workers, newspapers, and politicians uniformly opposed this "Yellow Peril". The common cause to eradicate Asians from the workforce gave rise to the Asiatic Exclusion League. When the fledging Indian community of mostly Punjabi Sikhs settled in California, the xenophobia expanded to combat not only the East Asian Yellow Peril, but now the immigrants from British India, colorfully described as the Turban Tide(a reference to Sikh Turbans as almost all of the immigrants at the time were Punjabi Sikhs) or the Hindoo invasion.