MAGA Indians were all about Trump. Many Rightists cannot stand them

“American culture has honored mediocrity over excellence,” Ramaswamy wrote in an attempt to explain why tech companies hire foreign workers. The post was met with a tidal wave of insults and revulsion towards the visa program. This too reportedly Ramaswamy’s January 2025 departure from DOGE expedited.

While Ramaswamy and even Elon Musk defended aspects of the H-1B visa, others want the program scrapped. In January, Texas Republican Party Chairman Abraham George, an American citizen born in India, called on the state to ban the hiring of workers on H-1B visas. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott did too have pledged to eliminate hiring at universities and in government by H-1Bs in their states.

Sidharth, a conservative tech entrepreneur and Musk superfan, says right-wing messages about H-1Bs — that they prevent Americans from building a living — are full of misinformation.

He’s not sure it matters. “The average American living in the suburbs isn’t going to notice. He’s going to believe what he sees on YouTube and X,” says Sidharth. His name is a pseudonym which he uses online and in his professional life to protect his identity, as he says he has received threats to his posts on Xoften detailing the racism faced by South Asians, including himself.

Trump’s 2024 campaign positioned the candidate as “pro-immigration” but “anti illegal immigration,” which some Indians took as an assurance, said Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate. The DC-based think tank published multiple reports on increasing anti-Indian hatred on X.

Indeed, Sidharth says he voted for Trump in 2024 because he wanted the administration to do more for legal immigration, and less to accommodate undocumented people. But as a naturalized citizen, he views Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship, which is go before the Supreme Courtto be inexcusable. He no longer considers himself a Republican but an “issue-based” independent, adding that he worries “we’ve lost the party completely, forever, to alt-right, Nazi behavior.”

He also claims JD Vance betrayed his own wife and children on several occasions to appeal to Groypers. At a Mississippi Turning Point event in October, Vance fielded a question about his wife’s Hindu faith, saying, “I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife will see it the same way.” (For their part, Fuentes and Groypers often target Vance because of his wife. Vance did said anyone who attacks Usha Vance, including Nick Fuentes, “can eat shit.”)

In a statement to WIRED, Vance’s spokesperson Parker Magid said, “Vice President Vance, husband of the first Indian-American Second Lady of the United States, Usha Vance, has repeatedly spoken out against racism of all kinds, and for Wired to suggest anything else is abhorrent.”

from outside, Indian collaboration with a party that trades in white nationalist rhetoric and imagery may seem paradoxical. But scholars say there is precedent.

“We are a deeply colonized people,” says Siddhartha Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India and associate professor of literature at The New School. In his view, the Indians in the Trump administration are part of a “buyer class” cozying up to power, a term first used in 18th- and 19th-century China for merchants who enriched themselves by mediating between Westerners and locals.