According to Vivek Ramaswamy, elite technology firms prefer to hire foreign-born workers, particularly those from India, over American ones because the former are simply more talented.
His comment helped kickstart a conversation about work visas and the American work ethic.
But Ramaswamy’s attempt at serious cultural criticism in his viral X post by alluding to high school social hierarchies was cringe-inducing. There was a problem with the former Republican presidential primary candidate’s post that went deeper than its misplaced references to various ‘90s sitcoms.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” the short-lived co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency wrote.
He went on to argue that if Americans began celebrating the valedictorian over the jock and encouraged their children to spend their weekends at science competitions rather than sleepovers — the way many Asian immigrant families do — we’d have a much better shot at producing the talent the tech industry needs right here at home.
I grew up watching ‘tiger parents’ pressure my friends
Ramaswamy believes that the strict parenting style of many Asian immigrants can provide a solution to American cultural malaise. But take it from someone who grew up in a community chock full of “those kinds of parents”: So-called tiger parenting won’t actually breed technical and innovative geniuses and get our nation back its competitive edge in the tech industry or any other like Ramaswamy says it will.
Instead, it’ll only produce future generations plagued by the same mediocrity he claims has put America in its current slumber.
Like Ramaswamy, I was raised by parents who immigrated to the United States from India. While I wouldn’t say my own parents qualify as the prototypical tiger mom and dad, I am deeply familiar with the harsh, achievement-oriented style of parenting practiced by countless immigrants from India and other South and East Asian countries.
Many of my peers’ parents seemed to view childhood and adolescence as one long elite college admissions rat race. I watched them sign my friends up for after-school learning programs like Kumon and academic competitions like Model United Nations and heavily discourage them from pursuing creative projects such as starting a band or simply hanging out with their classmates at a pool party.
Even their demands that their children participate in more social activities like team sports had a cynical purpose: to ensure that holistic Ivy League admissions committees would perceive their children as being “well-rounded.”
And they didn’t let the grind stop after their children had gotten into college, either. The parents of my former college classmates insisted that their kids limit their choice of major to only a few “practical” options, such as statistics or chemistry, and do whatever it takes to land a high-paying job in one of a handful of acceptable fields: medicine, engineering, finance or law. Pursuing any other path, they would say, would amount to “wasting” the great opportunities they sacrificed so much in immigrating to the United States for their children to have.
Restrictive, demanding and, more often than not, Asian parents like these are commonly called tiger parents, after Amy Chua’s popular 2011 book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”
In her memoir, the Chinese American author and Yale law professor tells the story of how she raised her daughters as an unrelenting disciplinarian who barred playdates and computer games and demanded hours of piano practice, threatening “no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years” if they didn’t obey.
Chua believes that her authoritarian parenting style has the best odds of producing hardworking and high-achieving offspring. Ramaswamy, who, was a former student of Chua’s at Yale, clearly agrees.
