Vivek Ramaswamy praised “immigrant parents” for producing achievers and denigrated “normal American parents” for producing a mediocre workforce in a tweet on Thursday.
Ramaswamy, a billionaire son of Indian immigrants, submitted that “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” on X.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” said Ramaswamy.
He continued:
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. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely
because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” 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.”Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
“This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up,” concluded Ramaswamy. “
President-elect Trump tapped Ramaswamy and fellow billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with a mandate to cut “$2 trillion” of government waste from the federal budget.
Read Ramaswamy’s post to X (formerly Twitter) here.