“American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” Ramaswamy wrote, in an attempt to explain why tech companies hire foreign workers. The post was met with a tidal wave of slurs and revulsion towards the visa program. It also reportedly expedited Ramaswamy’s January 2025 departure from DOGE.
While Ramaswamy and even Elon Musk defended aspects of the H-1B visa, others want the program scrapped. In January, Texas Republican Party chairman Abraham George—an American 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 pledged to eliminate hiring at universities and in the government through H-1Bs in their states.
Sidharth, a conservative tech entrepreneur and Musk superfan, says right-wing messaging about H-1Bs—that they’re preventing Americans from building a livelihood—is rife with misinformation.
He’s not sure that matters. “The average American living in the suburbs is not going to figure that out. He’s going to believe what he sees on YouTube and X,” says Sidharth. His name is a pseudonym which he uses online and in his professional life to protect his identity, as he says he’s received threats for his posts on X, which often detail the racism facing South Asians, including himself.
Trump’s 2024 campaign positioned the candidate as “pro-immigration” but “anti illegal immigration,” which some Indians took as an assurance, says Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate. The DC-based think tank has published multiple reports about rising anti-Indian hate on X.
Indeed, Sidharth says he voted for Trump in 2024, wanting the administration to do more for legal immigration, and less to accommodate undocumented people. But as a naturalized citizen, he considers Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which is going before the Supreme Court, to be inexcusable. He no longer considers himself a Republican, but an “issue-based” independent, adding he’s concerned “we’ve lost the party completely, forever, to alt-right, Nazi behavior.”
He also claims JD Vance has betrayed his own wife and kids on multiple occasions to appeal to Groypers. At a Mississippi Turning Point event in October, Vance fielded a question about his wife’s Hindu faith by saying, “I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.” (For their part, Fuentes and Groypers often target Vance because of his wife. Vance has said anyone who attacks Usha Vance, including Nick Fuentes, “can eat shit.”)
In a statement to WIRED, Vance spokesperson Parker Magid says, “Vice President Vance, husband of first Indian-American Second Lady of the United States Usha Vance, has repeatedly spoken out against racism of all kinds, and for Wired to suggest anything otherwise is disgusting.”
From the outside, Indian collaboration with a party that trafficks in white nationalist rhetoric and imagery might seem paradoxical. But scholars say there’s precedent.
“We are a deeply colonized people,” says Siddhartha Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India and associate professor of literary studies at The New School. In his view, the Indians in the Trump administration are part of a “comprador class” cozying up to power, a term first used in 18th- and 19th-century China for merchants who enriched themselves by intermediating between Westerners and locals.
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