Vivek Ramaswamy blames 90s sitcoms for tech companies hiring smarter immigrant workers

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the leaders of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in U.S. dynamism in science and technology, leading tech companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in a post on X.

“A culture that venerates Cory from Boy Meets World or Zach & Slater over Screech in Saved by the Bell, or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in Family Matters will not produce the best engineers,” he noted.

Ramaswamy, who himself is the child of immigrants to the U.S., argued that the nation needs a new “Sputnik moment” to spur domestic advancement in science and technology.

“We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again,” Ramaswamy added. “Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up.”

His comments are part of wider tensions that have been exposed in recent days within the Trump coalition, which includes both far-right anti-immigration views, and an increasing embrace of the tech industry, whose workforce is highly diverse and made up of many immigrants and first-generation Americans.

During the campaign, Trump doubled down on his long history of “America First” nativism and racism, calling for “bloody” mass deportations, the end of birthright citizenship, and claiming immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country.”

Those stances have contrasted with the reality of the tech world of Trump’s key ally Elon Musk in which foreign-born workers in the U.S. in 2021 made up nearly 20 percent of the overall STEM workforce and nearly 60 percent of doctorate-level computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers across fields, according to the National Science Foundation.

Musk has recently lamented the state of U.S. engineering talent, triggering outrage from the Trump base.

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” Musk wrote on Wednesday on X. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”

The “number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he later added. “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

That triggered pushback on social media.

“Nobody should come from another country taking American citizens’ jobs,” responded one user with the display name Constitutionalist America First, who said they worked in the internet technology field and had witnessed American workers lose status. “This needs more vetting as a policy prior to going ahead with it as it is not America Citizens First.”

“There has been a permanent opposition in the heartland (and most of the country, frankly) to helping out talented kids from poorer or rural areas,” another user, whose profile picture showed a red MAGA hat, added. “Americans have been locked out for decades in a sick game that puts our interests last.”

The Trump base’s hostility to immigrants also prompted criticism from social media users of the president-elect’s choice of adviser on artificial intelligence for his administration, Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan.

The attacks prompted the pro-Trump Shaun Maguire, a fellow venture capitalist, to defend Krishnan.

“Sriram has a huge heart and is very talented — I’m sad he’s the one who stepped on this landmine,” Maguire wrote on X on Wednesday, while claiming new immigrants needed to be “skilled” and “assimilate to American culture,” lest the U.S. become the “3rd world.”

“America is lucky to have him and so many other immigrants — our ancestors were all immigrants,” he added.

Trump’s own, lesser known history with migrant workers adds further complications to these debates.

Despite attaching much of his political rise to opposing immigration, Trump’s companies have also regularly employed undocumented people.