Indian American entrepreneur and political figure Vivek Ramaswamy highlighted the value of the nonimmigrant program amid rising debates over the future of H-1B visas for specialty occupations.
Ramaswamy, former co-chair of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, sparked discussion on social media by suggesting that Chinese students often outperform their American peers academically.
“75% of 8th graders in America aren’t proficient in math & the average student in China is 4 years ahead of the average US student,” he wrote Monday on X. “It’s time to get serious about fixing K-12 education.”
While Ramaswamy spoke specifically about students, Indian American Congressman Ro Khanna expressed a similar viewpoint during his appearance on the “All In” podcast last week. “One-third of the AI talent is in China, according to a lot of the reports,” Khanna told hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis at the time.
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“I want some of those folks to come to the United States so we can stay ahead of AI. So there are legitimate uses of the H-1B program,” Khanna said, emphasizing the need for reform in the visa system while criticizing President Trump’s blanket $100,000 fee on new H-1B applications.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy, a Harvard and Yale graduate born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents, has expressed views aligned with the Trump administration on revamping the visa system. In late 2023, as Ramaswamy launched his campaign for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race, he described the H-1B program as “indentured servitude” and pledged to “gut” the lottery-based system, replacing it with “actual meritocratic admission.”
“The lottery system needs to be replaced by actual meritocratic admission. It’s a form of indentured servitude that only accrues to the benefit of the company that sponsored an H-1B immigrant. I’ll gut it… The people who come as family members are not the meritocratic immigrants who make skills-based contributions to this country,” Ramaswamy said in a statement, as per Financial Express.
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More than a year later, Ramaswamy reignited the discussion by highlighting the tech sector’s dependence on H-1B visas to bring in skilled talent from India, China, and other nations. In December 2024, he and fellow former DOGE head Elon Musk publicly supported the visa program.
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture,” Ramaswamy argued.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the ‘90s and likely longer). A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he added.