Amid the ongoing hot debate over the ‘specialty occupations’ H-1B visas, Indian-origin US entrepreneur and politician Vivek Ramaswamy potentially pointed out why the country needs the nonimmigrant category. The former co-chair of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency took to his social media account, insinuating the average Chinese student was superior to their counterpart in America in studies.
“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,” he wrote on X Monday night (US time). “It’s time to get serious about fixing K-12 education.”
Ro Khanna had similar thoughts on the H-1B issue
Although his focus was on students, Indian-origin Congressman Ro Khanna implied a similar sentiment during an appearance on the ‘All In’ podcast last week. “One-third of the AI talent is in China, according to a lot of the reports,” he told hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis at the time.
75% of 8th graders in America aren’t proficient in math & the average student in China is 4 years ahead of the average U.S. student. It’s time to get serious about fixing K-12 education. https://t.co/tf2xFFtIwa
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 5, 2025
“I want some of those folks to come to the United States so we can stay ahead of AI. So there are legitimate uses of the H-1B program,” he added, as he stood by the need for reform on the visa scene, while speaking out against US President Donald Trump’s blanket $100,000 fee imposition for new H-1B applications.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s history of H-1B visa debates
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy, a Harvard and Yale alum born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents, had previously shared similar views to the Donald Trump administration regarding a potential overhaul of the visa program. Currently running for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election, he called the H-1B visa program “indentured servitude,” while promising to “gut” its lottery-based system and replace it by “actual meritocratic admission” in late 2023.
The biotech pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences founder, who brought in employees for the firm through H-1B visa on numerous occasions, called it “bad for everyone involved,” as per Politico.
A Republican presidential aspirant at the time, Ramaswamy said in a statement, “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.”
Over a year later, he again sparked a debate on the issue by drawing attention to the tech industry’s reliance on the visa type to attract skilled workers from India, China and other countries. Back in December 2024, he and fellow ex-DOGE head Elon Musk backed the visa category.
Ramaswamy argued, “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.”
Spurring heated responses all around, he went on to say, “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”