In 1942, Kanji Manchhu Desai, an undocumented farmworker from Surat, Gujarat, leased a 32-room hotel in Sacramento. The opportunity arose when the hotel was emptied due to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. This marked the first hotel owned by a person of Indian origin in the United States. Desai’s practical business decision inadvertently started a massive chain migration of Gujarati hoteliers. Over the next eight decades, the descendants of these immigrants grew to own roughly 60% of all hotels in the country, creating an industry generating $700 billion annually and four million jobs.
