Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to help lead a government-efficiency initiative, recently argued on X that Americans can learn from high-skill immigrants, especially those working in the science and tech industries, because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” He suggested that certain immigrant communities have promoted a superior culture that values excellence and produces “wildly successful STEM graduates.”
I have heard some version of Mr. Ramaswamy’s sentiments countless times over the years. I grew up north of Atlanta in the 1990s as the son of two Pakistani parents and came to know hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis who hail from the culture Mr. Ramaswamy is lionizing. (He noted that he personally knew “multiple sets of immigrant parents in the ’90s” who took meticulous steps to inculcate values of excellence.) Few of those immigrants would disagree with him.
It would be easy to shrug this off as South Asian chauvinism. The idea of a “model minority,” which puts Asian Americans on a pedestal, has been criticized with considerable justification. For one thing, the immigrants who come to the United States from those societies are typically among their most ambitious members. In the case of South Asia, they don’t represent a cross section of India or Pakistan, where millions of people still lack literacy and are not coming to our shores to run tech companies.
But that doesn’t mean Americans have nothing to learn from South Asian immigrant culture. Indian Americans are among the richest ethnic groups in America. One reason is that they have high levels of educational achievement. They also have high rates of marriage and very low rates of divorce. There is no doubt that an emphasis on academics and stable families has helped South Asians find a foothold in this country.
What Mr. Ramaswamy leaves out of his story, however, are the trade-offs of success. Over the years, I’ve spoken to many South Asians who have related to me the stresses that this culture places on them. One therapist told me that the Indian American children she sees often struggle with low self-esteem, low confidence and perfectionism. Because parents don’t understand what this form of parenting is doing to their children’s mental health, she often must convince them to allow her to treat their kids by telling them — you guessed it — that doing so will help the kids in their studies.
The pragmatism that Mr. Ramaswamy values also means that Asian Americans are overrepresented in STEM-related fields but underrepresented in industries like Hollywood. Our community tends to discourage us from pursuing the arts and humanities. As a kid, I often resented it for that reason.
It took me years to understand that this is a culture not of success but of survival. My parents grew up surrounded by immense poverty. In my own trips to Karachi, Pakistan, their hometown, what stood out most to me was seeing children begging on the street everywhere I looked.
An environment like that changes you. When our parents encourage us to study hard or marry early or go to medical school or be frugal, they’re trying to protect us from the terror of precarity they faced on the subcontinent. Even a “third culture” kid like me — someone who was raised in the crosscurrents of two cultures — can’t deny inheriting some of this instinct. I spend many hours every month looking for deals and coupons; at restaurants, I always finish my food or request a doggie bag and feel some disgust when I see waiters take half-eaten plates away from other diners.
But as South Asians continue to establish ourselves here in America, I hope the community learns that we can afford to let our children relax more. We don’t have to make our kids participate in half a dozen sports to get into college. (One sport and one extracurricular is fine.) They don’t always have to study STEM subjects. And it’s OK to splurge a little bit with the spending money we have from time to time.
Mr. Ramaswamy is right that Americans have something to learn from South Asian communities. But we also have something to learn from the rest of America: Fear of precarity doesn’t have to rule our lives. The Indian American dream doesn’t just have to be about hard work; it can also be about enjoying the life that hard work has produced.
