This article is from Esquire in 2008, three years before your article.
Raj was the daughter of a bank manager. She first came to America on a scholarship to study for her doctorate in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. She brought along her husband, a love match named Amar Jindal, himself the son of a shopkeep from the bania caste, the only one of the nine children in his family to attend school past fifth grade. At the time the couple immigrated, Raj was three months pregnant with their first son, Piyush. Though the university health plan denied coverage for the birth (it was ruled a "preexisting condition"), the one-month paid maternity leave was awarded as promised — that was the perk that had tipped the scales for Amar, who'd been hesitant to leave home, having worked his way up through the ranks to the respected position of assistant professor of engineering at Punjab University in Chandigarh, the newly dedicated capital city of their home state.
More from 1996... Bobby Jindal in 1996: Louisiana's 24-year-old 'Whiz Kid' had critics and admirers
Piyush Jindal - he borrowed the name Bobby from "The Brady Bunch" when he was 4 - was born in Baton Rouge, but just barely. His parents had arrived only six months earlier from India so his mother could attend graduate school in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University.
It may be that they got green cards through the father, but they wouldn't have come in the first place if not for the mother's scholarship and paid maternity leave.
-PJ