Vivek steps in it with Trump's base on H1-B visas

Vivek Ramaswamy, who has impressed so many these past few months, seems to have made a misstep in his task leading the Department of Government Efficiency, co-chaired with Elon Musk.

He put out this lengthy tweet:

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. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024

Which didn't go over well with quite a few supporters of President Trump.

It drew responses like these:

IT'S ALL 'FRIENDS' FAULT: What Vivek really thinks about America. He has a point. a) Also has the arrogance of many striving immigrant families (maybe also a tech thing--did German Jews who came here and flourished before and during WWII have it?) b) Does not seem to have a firm… https://t.co/Z5UffKqxbT

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) December 26, 2024

Get fucked. He didn’t sound like this when he was appealing to voters—how’d that have gone? He’s always been a con man. pic.twitter.com/xlOP7Y0epP

— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) December 26, 2024

Why isn’t India the most technically advanced society in the world? I mean they have the most qualified workers in the world there.

— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) December 26, 2024

100%

Talk to recruiters, or to young graduates, even those with “prestigious” degrees. If they also happen to be white males…the job market is brutal! https://t.co/VOQUbB3jei

— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) December 26, 2024

This is a revealing take from @VivekGRamaswamy , and probably (judging from other comments from others on X and my own extensive personal experience with Indian Americans in Silicon Valley) fairly representative.

Before I get into why it is fundamentally wrong in its most… https://t.co/rwLrWvaRV7

— Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) December 26, 2024

What if I told you the root cause of the "decline" of teenage American competence and skill was not Saturday morning cartoons or too much mall time

What if I told you it can be directly traced to the introduction of the smart phone + social media + internet porn

i.e., the tech…

— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) December 26, 2024

From my time working visas at State, I can tell you that, in general, in general, the H-1 visa is a scam. This is the first misstep by my heroes in DOGE. It’s a way to get cheap labor in high tech.

— Lewis Amselem (@TheDiplomad) December 26, 2024

Rare but radioactively wrong misread of American culture. The best thing about America is that people who were dorky in 9th grade can become incredibly cool later on. Jocks can be valedictorians and often are. We don’t have a rigid caste system of “cool.” Most great, defining… pic.twitter.com/AtMW2MJKPv

— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) December 26, 2024

How does this make you feel, @VivekGRamaswamy ? pic.twitter.com/Us2Ua7991S

— Just Loki (@LokiJulianus) December 26, 2024

The reason that top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans is called: labor arbitrage.

Vivek and his friends just want dirt-cheap Indian coders for their AI schemes.

Vivek isn't America First. Vivek is Vivek First. https://t.co/xB6l4JF6V9

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) December 26, 2024

Vivek Ramaswamy hasn’t escaped the Indian mindset.

It takes more than the ability to do math, science & coding to build American innovation.

It takes the Western Culture: Work-life balance, the love for humanity & the arts.

Third-world culture hasn’t reached that point. https://t.co/1tidwL4Pbv

— Working Class Media (@WorkingClassMe) December 26, 2024
 
To be fair, Vivek had some defenders, too. No one should disagree with him that values matter.

But I found the particulars of his argument old and unpersuasive -- that the younger generation didn't measure up to previous ones because of cartoons and television. Sure, Hollywood values have gone downhill, but those were the arguments senior citizens heard in their youth about how they didn't measure up to the previous one, too. I heard them in the 1980s. Keenan's observation about the introduction of tech, which is addictive, and which made Ramaswamy rich, is worth considering more seriously.

But it's a tangled argument, the main reason of which is that people are individuals, some good, some bad, some hard-working, some cronies. Some have truly American values and some have third-world-intellectual-elite values. And some are percentages of these good and bad things, which makes it even more complicated.

A day or two before Vivek's tweet, filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza laid out that everyone is an individual and should be judged as one, slightly amusingly, given his contrasts:

There are good and bad Indians. I’m obviously one of the good ones. I suspect this Sriram guy is too. On the other hand, these two Indians pictured below were an intrinsic part of the censorship regime on social media. I wish we could deport them! pic.twitter.com/wMU7mBENiR

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) December 25, 2024

Which brings us back to Vivek and his tweet, which rubbed a lot of MAGA conservatives the wrong way, given that he came across as a heartless Silicon Valley baron, not a MAGA advocate. 

Lefties are rejoicing, saying the conservative movement is eating its own, backbiting, spinning into chaos and President Trump hasn't even taken office.

This is nonsense.

The fracas has lots of things worth considering from both sides, but that's neither here, nor there.

It draws attention to the fact that Vivek was asked by President Trump to find ways to make the government more efficient.

Already he's off topic with this tweet, trying to remake the entire society, commenting on immigration in a long missive, and not focused on making government more efficient. That makes me wonder if he's in the right job.

He's annoyed people because of the overly broad nature of his multi-layered topic, and the fact that most people have moved on from complaints about cartoons to much deeper cultural issues as well as arguments that cronyism and globalism are why Americans can't get good jobs makes it a hard issue for him to back away from.  

Is he bored of the DOGE job already? Did he only want it to be near Elon? This questions are important, because he's costing Trump politically with these off-topic pronouncements now that the country's eyes are on him.

Elon is putting out tweets like these, ultra-focused on DOGE:

The reason the government so insanely inefficient is that those in the government are spending your money on somebody else.

That’s why we should minimize how much the government does. It is simply a giant version of the DMV!

pic.twitter.com/tEGwYzT9et

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2024

We either fix this or go de facto bankrupt https://t.co/hmjpx6uBfd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2024

Vivek is complaining about the broad cultural problems among the voters, and some of it may be true. But it's not his job and his opinions are not helpful to President Trump.

I'm no Vivek-hater and I don't like to see some of the abuse hurled at him that I do. But he might be misplaced where he is. Maybe he should start his own think tank around culture instead, creating his own bully pulpit, instead of hold the spotlight as part of DOGE. He may even do some good.

Elon can finish up with DOGE by himself. Maybe that's the best way.

Image: X screen shot

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