Vivek Ramaswamy's Read On American 'Mediocrity' Sparks Conservative Immigration Skirmish

LOADING ERROR LOADING Vivek Ramaswamy got quite a strong reaction from conservatives when he tried to explain hiring trends across the tech sector in a culturally-charged social media post on Thursday. The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit. Tough questions demand tough answers & if… — Vivek Ramaswamy December 26, 2024 Comparing and contrasting characters from several popular ’90s sitcoms, Ramaswamy went on to say, “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.” His solution? Bloomberg via Getty Images Turning back to America’s supposed inclination toward the average, he said, “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent” and that “if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.” Ramaswamy then tried to rally readers to help shift the status quo by envisioning a future where America “once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.” While he pinned demographic disparities across the tech world on supposed cultural differences, the imbalance is more likely about dollars and cents. Though Tesla CEO Elon Musk, like Ramaswamy, has vowed to be behind Trump’s harsh immigration policies, on Wednesday he posted that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” and the country needs “to recruit top talent wherever they may be.” But Ramaswamy and Musk’s reasoning really seemed to rub some of their conservative peers the wrong way.