President-elect Donald Trump’s recent appointment of a certain Indian American has sparked debate over legal immigration reform.
Sriram Krishnan, a venture capitalist, will serve as the senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He isn’t the first Indian American to hold a high-ranking office in the White House, but his previous posts about expanding the number of work visas issued each year landed him in hot water earlier this week.
And now, the conversation is much bigger than Krishnan.
The appointment of Krishnan, whom Elon Musk appointed to temporarily oversee X, formerly known as Twitter, sparked the debate.
Laura Loomer, a conservative firebrand influencer and former congressional candidate, who said she voted against policies that would expand the existing H-1B work visa program, became one of the first few voices to oppose Krishnan’s nomination. But she was met with strong opposition from the techies from the MAGA world, like Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, revealing a crack within the Republican Party that is expected to be about “America First” for the next four years.
What we know about the H-1B visa program
To obtain this visa, a foreign-born immigrant has to find a job in a specialized or technical field. The employer should be willing to file the H-1B petition on the immigrant’s behalf and incur the expenses associated with in, including lawyers’ fees.
After filing the petition, foreign employees are put through a lottery process that randomly selects 85,000 immigrants, the annual limit of visas offered each year, established in 1990. Each visa is valid for three years and is tied to an employer. To switch jobs, the new employer is required to file a new petition.
The Department of Homeland Security’s report from 2023 found that 72% of H-1B recipients between October 2022 and September 2023 were of Indian origin. China claimed the second spot with 12%, as Axios reported. There’s also a gender discrepancy — 71% of the visa recipients were men.
“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate,” Loomer said in one post. She replied on the time-old argument that these foreign-born recruits are stealing American jobs.
Many other users on X sided with Loomer, arguing the system neither favors American workers nor does it benefit America, but many conservatives disagreed, fueling infighting within the MAGA world.
This debate comes after a surge of migrants in the millions crossed the southern border under the Biden administration, which ultimately promoted calls for closing the border and reforming legal pathways. But now, one of the legal pathways to working and residing in the U.S. is garnering scrutiny.
Here’s what Vivek Ramaswamy thinks Asians get right
Vivek Ramaswamy also wagged his finger at Loomer and others critical of the Indian American workforce that has legally migrated to the U.S., saying the problem has nothing to do with the “innate American IQ deficit,” and everything to do with the Asian culture.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the ’90s and likely longer),” Ramaswamy said in a post on X. “That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
“More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall,’” Ramaswamy wrote.
Ramaswamy said American parents are often skeptical of Asian parenting methods but added, “If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.”
But the entrepreneur added a caveat. He agrees the work visa program “is badly broken (and) should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best (not a lottery), pro-competitive (no indentured service to one company), and de-bureaucratized.”
His statements weren’t well received by some hard line conservatives like Mike Cernovich, who pushed back and stated the U.S. doesn’t need rescuing at the hands of foreigners. Others online said he missed the mark on what it truly meant to be an American.
The system also faces many instances of fraud. In some instances, a hired subcontractor files an H-1B petition for the foreign-born immigrant, but there’s no job to be filled. Others have filed multiple petitions to higher their chances of receiving the lottery, even though each applicant is allowed only one chance, according to The Associated Press. Critics also say the H-1B visa program allows companies to pay foreign-born employees lower wages while reducing labor protections.
Should the U.S. impose an immigration moratorium?
Despite the issues, is Ramaswamy right? Can the success of Indian Americans in the U.S. be attributed to cultural differences?
Conservative commentator Saagar Enjeti, the host of the “Breaking Points” podcast and an American of Indian descent, in a post on X argued that Indian Americans prove they can successfully integrate their values of hard work and dedication to the family unit “with the American spirit of dynamism born from founders and the frontier spirit.”
The Asian culture emphasizes conformity and rote learning, which really leads to innovation, he wrote. Meanwhile, the modern culture in the West is “dominated by hedonism,” Enjeti added.
“The culture I want to venerate is the American culture which beat the Axis powers in WW2,” he said. “It had important institutional checks against hedonism, encouraged hard work AND also heavily prioritized athletics, leadership, and social skills.” He suggested implementing an immigration moratorium until the country hashes out its differences and agrees on what the culture should look like for future generations.
Enjeti concluded his analysis by asking Indian Americans to reject identity politics, and instead embrace the America that President Theodore Roosevelt once envisioned.
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.”
Musk, standing by his DOGE co-leader Ramaswamy, said he favors the H-1B system that helps companies like SpaceX and Tesla recruit world-class engineering talent. He categorizes it as “essential for America to keep winning.”
Trump also favors this legal pathway to immigration. In fact, he supports awarding green cards to those immigrants who graduate from U.S. colleges, whether it’s a two-year degree or a doctorate.
“Too often, talented grads are forced to leave and start billion-dollar companies in India or China instead of here. That success and those jobs should be in America,” Trump previously said. Although it’s worth noting Trump temporarily froze H-1B visas during his first term. Trump stayed out of the conflict, mostly confined to X. But it’s unclear whether Congress and the White House will answer the questions raised against the H-1B visa program.
Editor’s note: Deseret News reporter Gitanjali Poonia experienced the H-1B visa program as an immigrant participant after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American institutions.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Laura Loomer as a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was a candidate.