Unlike many cockamamie appointments, Donald Trump made what on the surface looks like a pretty good choice to be his policy adviser on artificial intelligence. But when he picked Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American entrepreneur, he sparked a backlash in his own party that revealed the ugly underbelly of Trumpism, an underbelly that has been frequently scratched these past 10 years and will expect to be scratched in the coming four years.
Krishnan is an enthusiast for letting in more highly skilled immigrants, in part because he is just such an immigrant and in part because he has helped seed the growth of countless successful immigrant-led and immigrant-fueled American tech companies. Last month, he tweeted, “Anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge.” Indeed it would.
The notion, however, is at odds with the likes of Laura Loomer. The woman who was at Trump’s side for much of the 2024 campaign reacted to the appointment with rage, tweeting: “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India.”
That nativist outburst, and the fact that many in MAGA-land seconded the emotion, prompted the incoming vice president, JD Vance — who is married to the daughter of highly skilled immigrants from India — to recoil. It rightly offended Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump ally who’s co-heading up his “Department of Government Efficiency” — who is the son of highly skilled immigrants from India.
Immigrants can be and often are every bit as patriotic as native-born Americans, and their economic contributions to this country can be and often are every bit as profound. Closing the door to highly skilled immigrants on the theory that our nation’s innate character is mostly European is as short-sighted as it is racist.
We’ve had plenty of disagreements with Ramaswamy, and we expect to have more. But he was right on the value and need for energetic newcomers when he wrote on Twitter: “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. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
“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…
“‘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….”
Removing relatively uneducated, often undocumented immigrants from the U.S. economy by the millions, as Trump plans to do, will have drastic and negative effects for farming, home construction and many other sectors of the U.S. economy. It would devastate New York City. But highly skilled immigrants, who overwhelmingly enter legally, are literally building our upwardly mobile future. When we turn them away from the United States, we cut off our collective nose to spite our imagined Anglo-Saxon face.