Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley tore into her old rival Vivek Ramaswamy on Thursday, after the entrepreneur and Trump administration adviser wrote a lengthy takedown arguing mainstream U.S. culture doesn’t encourage science and technology excellence, leading companies to hire foreign-born and first-generation workers.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote in response on X. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
The pair previously clashed when both were candidates during the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Ramaswamy, who is a first-generation Indian-American, was accused in 2023 of attempting to use a racist dogwhistle by criticizing Haley using her maiden name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, and suggesting she was being untruthful about her own Indian family background.
“I’m not gonna get involved in these childish name games; it’s pretty pathetic,” Haley said at the time.
Haley, meanwhile, called Ramaswamy “scum” during one of the primary debates after he argued she was being hypocritical for criticizing TikTok while letting her daughter use the app.
The dust-up is part of a larger intra-party fight going on within the GOP at the moment, after Ramaswamy and Elon Musk both spoke out over the last two days criticizing the U.S. workforce while suggesting immigrant and first-generation workers were more qualified.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote in a post on X on Thursday.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk said yesterday on X. “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.”
Many within the MAGA movement reacted in anger to the comments, arguing they went against the Trump campaign’s “America First” nativist agenda. During the campaign, Trump doubled down on his long history of hardline and often racist immigration stances, calling for “bloody” mass deportations and claiming immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country.”
Musk and Ramaswamy later attempted to clarify their comments.
“Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote on X on Thursday. “This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA. Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”
“Merit or group quotas,” Ramaswamy added. “Can’t have both. I’ve said it for years & it remains my view today.”
While Musk and Ramaswamy’s comments dealt with legal workers pursuing work visas in specialized fields like technology and engineering, the Trump administration they support has called for a wider crackdown on illegal immigrants, promising to end birthright citizenship and carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history immediately upon taking office, including a potential resumption of “zero tolerance” family separation.
The policies could eliminate immigration-related pathways all three appear to have benefitted from.
Ramaswamy, the child of legal Indian immigrants, received birthright citizenship. (Ramaswamy has said he supports birthright citizenship for the children of legal immigrants, but not for illegal immigrants.)
Elon Musk began his career in the U.S. working illegally, according to reporting from The Washington Post, though Musk denies this.
Trump, meanwhile, employed illegal immigrants at his businesses in the past.
