Vivek Ramaswamy on immigrants
Much of the current discussion around changes to H-1B visas for South Asian communities is still hypothetical, so we will have to actually see what the upcoming Trump administration chooses to do in the weeks and months ahead. But one discussion that has come out of the recent debates about the value of H-1B workers is Vivek Ramaswamy’s sentiments about one aspect of the immigrant experience.
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Ramaswamy responded to the anti-immigrant MAGA faction within the Republican Party with his belief that American culture is largely responsible for not producing strong homegrown engineering and tech talent at scale, which is why he is among those who want to continue allowing highly skilled immigrants to come to the U.S.
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. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” 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).
Ramaswamy is overly broad in his framing of cultural issues and chooses to ignore mentioning that his new boss is a former reality TV star. But, aside from Ramaswamy’s arrogance in his words, he’s somewhat correct in his big-picture sentiment about American culture.
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I studied for my Earth Science test
I believe mainstream American culture is largely broken for almost always championing athletes who throw around pigskin or celebrities who have a billion followers on TikTok, over scientists, writers, and researchers. I honestly always felt like I was doing something wrong as a teenager for preferring books and movies, over ragers and hookup culture (not that anything is wrong with the latter). At one point, I even vividly recall hiding a fact from a high-school classmate that, yes, I had studied for today’s earth science test, but instead tried to appear “cool” like I didn’t care. Whatever man, we’ll see how I do. It still baffles me that there were always a few who took for granted our largely free K-12 public education. My early years of college were an incredible awakening when I realized that I didn’t have to be ashamed for loving learning.
What we promote as valuing in American culture doesn’t seem at all better today — but frankly worse: A recent survey found more than half of Gen-Z Americans polled want to be influencers. In my generation, at least we wanted to be astronauts, striving to visit other worlds, not counting likes and reflecting our own bubbles.
But two things can be true at once
While there are definitely issues in our American culture, I have also appreciated American culture and schooling for the creativity it has always encouraged, its unique blend of book smarts and innovation. I often think: We don’t manufacture the iPhone here, but damn right, we invented it here. I appreciate how elementary teachers would read us books or discuss a subject as we’d sit together in circles on the floor; how we did a whole middle-school unit on empathy after 9/11; how we learned about traditions ranging from Christmas to Eid to Hanukkah to Diwali; and how American education generally encourages kids to be full humans with soft skills, too.
That is why I find Ramaswamy’s arrogance about Indian American communities’ stereotyped discipline and professional success representative of a larger issue that we need to talk more about: At what cost are we championing exceptionalism?
While, yes, Indian Americans, in particular, are among the richest and most educated groups in the United States, much of that is attributed to who was allowed to immigrate here for decades. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 largely drove highly skilled, educated Asians to move to the U.S.
The struggle for perfectionism
Last week, Pakistani American journalist Zaid Jilani, who also grew up as a second-generation kid, wrote a powerful essay in The New York Times about Ramaswamy’s rhetoric:
What Mr. Ramaswamy leaves out of his story, however, are the trade-offs of success. Over the years, I’ve spoken to many South Asians who have related to me the stresses that this culture places on them. One therapist told me that the Indian American children she sees often struggle with low self-esteem, low confidence and perfectionism. Because parents don’t understand what this form of parenting is doing to their children’s mental health, she often must convince them to allow her to treat their kids by telling them — you guessed it — that doing so will help the kids in their studies.
The pragmatism that Mr. Ramaswamy values also means that Asian Americans are overrepresented in STEM-related fields but underrepresented in industries like Hollywood. Our community tends to discourage us from pursuing the arts and humanities. As a kid, I often resented it for that reason.
Both as a journalist who covers South Asian Americans, but also in my own personal life experiences (especially after dating in our communities), I see the problems, too: Some second-gen desis who care more about the prestige of their career and material success than anything else.
Enjoying a childhood
My own dad is a testament to the perils of Indian American exceptionalism and openly shares his own experience these days. Growing up in South India, he was a smart child who excelled at math and science. So he was just 15 years old when he was accepted into engineering college and moved away from home to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (often considered harder to get into than schools like Harvard). While he cherishes the academic experience he had in those days, he reflects back on how hard it was, at age 15, to be living on his own and not as mature mentally or physically as his other college-age peers. The non-academic pressures weighed on him at that young age, he has sometimes told me.
So when it came time to raise his own children, years later in the U.S., he made conscious decisions with my mom that were a bit different. Like many other Indian parents, they always encouraged strong academics. We visited our public library every week. They read to us almost every night. We only watched TV on weekends — the daily newscast the sole exception. The expectation was always to do well in school and pursue higher education. Girls and books don’t mix, they would joke, though somewhat serious.
But when our teachers told my parents we should skip a grade, move to a gifted-and-talented program, sell our house and move to a more prestigious school district, or switch to a pricey private school, my parents said: No. We want our kids to be at the local public school where they can walk there. Be friends with the neighborhood kids we live next to. To play outside. To be… kids.
In this new Instagram video from Stanford, student and basketball player Ryan Agarwal, discusses how his Indian parents supported his nontraditional athlete journey.
Now in my mid-30s, I really appreciate that my parents emphasized balance. It was OK to play with friends outside, to do watercolor art in our basement, to stretch our imaginations with Hot Wheels and Legos, to get presents from Santa, to experiment with cooking in the kitchen, to build makeshift BMX bike jumps with wood on our cul-de-sac. But it was also OK to be excited about books, join the Odyssey of the Mind club, or be proud of getting an A on something — and to eventually follow our professional interests in college and beyond.
Mental health & the Model Minority
I wonder if the pressures that some desi peers experienced at a far more intense degree might just be an inherent part of the immigrant experience — the we-got-to-make-it/we-moved-all-the-way-here-for-a-reason sentiments. As Jilani points out in the Times, many first-generation parents are “trying to protect us from the terror of precarity they faced on the subcontinent.”
I totally get that and am often proud of the achievements of many in our communities, especially when I see a Brown person achieve a milestone for the first time in the U.S. But I also believe what Jilani writes at the end of his essay: “Fear of precarity doesn’t have to rule our lives. The Indian American dream doesn’t just have to be about hard work; it can also be about enjoying the life that hard work has produced.”
While we are successful in one light, our South Asian American communities are often failing on other fronts: in promoting taking care of mental health, in championing healthy relationships, in encouraging creativity, in prioritizing physical health, in defining success with nuance.
I slightly cringe when I read headlines that, while good-intentioned, promote the model minority myth and could inspire more pressure: 9-year-old South Asian child gets into every Ivy League university after making breakthrough discovery.
I mean, good for them. But at what cost are we promoting that culture?
As our second generation continues to take new roles of influence in the U.S. and we raise the third generation, I hope we evolve to understand — and champion — new definitions of what success means to each individual, instead of depending on exceptionalism.
This article was first published in Red White and Brown.
Photo of Vivek Ramaswamy: By Sedgedorrit – I took this photo when I attended the Basel Conference in June 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137036656