Ramaswami tried to explain this by writing, “American culture has valued mediocrity over excellence.” In an attempt to explain why tech companies hire foreign workers. The post sparked a wave of abuse and hatred towards the visa program. It also reportedly hastened Ramaswamy’s departure from DOGE in January 2025.
While Ramaswamy and even Elon Musk defended aspects of the H-1B visa, others want the program to be eliminated. In January, Texas Republican Party Chairman Abraham George—a US citizen born in India—called for the state to ban hiring workers on H-1B visas. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have also promised to eliminate hiring in universities and government through H-1B in their states.
Siddharth, a conservative tech entrepreneur and Musk superfan, says the right-wing message about H-1Bs—that they are preventing Americans from making livelihoods—is full of misinformation.
He’s not sure it matters. “The average American living in the suburbs won’t understand it. He believes what he sees on YouTube and X,” says Siddharth. His name is a pseudonym he uses online and in his professional life to protect his identity, as he says he has received threats for his posts on X, which detail the racism often faced by South Asians, including himself.
Trump’s 2024 campaign positions the candidate as “pro-immigration” but “anti-immigration” illegal “Immigration, which some Indians took as assurance,” says Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate. The DC-based think tank has published several reports about rising anti-India hatred on the X.
Indeed, Siddharth says he voted for Trump in 2024 because he wanted the administration to do more to support legal immigration, and less to accommodate undocumented people. But as a naturalized citizen, he considers Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which is pending in the Supreme Court, inexcusable. He no longer considers himself a Republican, but an “issue-based” independent and worries that “we have lost the party completely, forever, because of alt-right, Nazi behavior.”
He also claims that J.D. Vance has cheated on his wife and children on several occasions in order to appeal to gropers. At a Mississippi Turning Point event in October, Vance fielded a question about his wife’s Hindu faith, saying, “I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope that eventually my wife will come to see it the same way.” (For their part, Fuentes and the Grippers often target Vance because of his wife. Vance has said that anyone who attacks Usha Vance, including Nick Fuentes, can “eat crap.”)
In a statement to WIRED, Vance spokesperson Parker Magid says, “Vice President Vance, husband of Usha Vance, the first Indian-American second lady of the United States, has repeatedly spoken out against racism of all forms, and it is disgusting for WIRED to suggest anything otherwise.”
from outside, Indian cooperation with a party that traffics in white nationalist rhetoric and imagery may seem paradoxical. But scholars say that there is an example of this.
“We are a deeply colonized people,” says Siddharth Deb, author of The Twilight Prisoner: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India and Associate Professor of Literary Studies at The New School. In his view, those sympathetic to Indian power in the Trump administration are part of the “comrade class”, a term first used in China in the 18th and 19th centuries for traders who enriched themselves by brokering deals between Westerners and locals.
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