Vivek Ramaswamy has laughed off viral claims that he’s hiring H-1B visa holders for his Ohio gubernatorial campaign over Americans. Taking to his official X account Wednesday night (US time), the former presidential candidate reacted to his campaign manager Jonathan Ewing highlighting a social media post that pilloried the Indian-origin Silicon Valley entrepreneur for deeming foreign nationals more suited for the job.

Vivek Ramaswamy reacts to fake H-1B hiring

The Ohio governor hopeful simply posted two laughing emoticons, while re-sharing the post thread on his account. Ewing, on the other, gave out a more detailed explanation, as he took issue with the post pushing big claims against Ramaswamy and going viral for it despite peddling inaccurate insinuations.

“This post got nearly 200k views, internet people are throwing a fit,” Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign manager wrote on the platform, “yet it’s a fake image & 100% false.”

Affirming his own identity as the campaign manager, he went on to “confirm” that their team didn’t include any H-1B hire. “…can confirm we’ve never hired an H1B for our campaign (ridiculous),” he added. “Just one of many examples of slanderous slop out there, don’t fall for it.”

Viral post slams Vivek Ramaswamy over false accusations

In addition to offering his clarification, Jonathan even included the screenshot of the controversial post going around on social media. The fake H-1B claims in the post suggested, “Americans aren’t good enough for Vivek Ramaswamy.”

“Why, precisely, does he NEED Pinder and Daraljeet crushing the numbers? Is there no one in the entire Buckeye State worthy of the task of creating his pivot tables?” read the post shared by a user called MILO (“@Nero). The supposedly false proclamations, in turn, came along with a screenshot of a so-called “H1B Salary Database 2025,” which, in turn, bore the sub-header “Ramaswamy for Ohio H1B Salary 2024.”

The picture in question indicated that several analysts had been brought in for Ramaswamy’s campaign, and were being paid base salaries, ranging from $91,630 to $99,000. These photo claimed that these people belonged to Austin and Draper.

Although the full list isn’t disclosed in the picture, a brief explainer above it read, with grammatical mistakes, as such: “2026 records was found, Median Salary is $145851.08. 10 percents of the salary…$200K, 36 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 48 percents… are between $100K and $150K, 6 percents of the salary are less than $100k.”

Where does the Indian-origin entrepreneur stand on H-1B debate

The latest hit on Ramaswamy adds to the long-running discourse and debate over the H-1B issue, which the Ohio-based entrepreneur has spoken out on several times. He was particularly targeted late last year and early this year (alongside Elon Musk) for urging then-president-elect Donald Trump to bring in more foreign tech workers.

Having long voiced his support for the ‘specialty occupations’ work visa category, Ramaswamy previously penned a lengthy explanation on why top tech companies hire foreign-born over “native” Americans. “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer),” he wrote on X in December 2024. “That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”

Giving heavy inputs on the issue at the time, he reiterated the sentiment earlier this month. Once again taking to his X account, Vivek Ramaswamy said in an early October post, “75% of 8th graders in America aren’t proficient in math & the average student in China is 4 years ahead of the average US student. It’s time to get serious about fixing K-12 education.”

Despite being all for the highly talented foreign workers, Ramaswamy isn’t backing the H-1B visa program for the sake of it. His thought-process actually aligns with what the majority in the US now calling out the nonimmigration category for supposedly contributing to “visa abuse.” Back in 2023, the he called the program “indentured servitude,” and promised to gut its lottery-based system, while replacing it by “actual meritocratic admission.”

Although the biotech pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences founder has often brought in H-1B visa holders as employees of the firm, he even called it “bad for everyone involved.”

The then-presidential candidate said, “The lottery system needs to be replaced by actual meritocratic admission. It’s a form of indentured servitude that only accrues to the benefit of the company that sponsored an H-1B immigrant. I’ll gut it… The people who come as family members are not the meritocratic immigrants who make skills-based contributions to this country,” as per Politico.

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