Vice President JD Vance said American companies should hire and train Americans. Y Combinator partner Ankit Gupta called that “DEI.” That reply exposes the worldview of the modern Silicon Valley tech institutions. These are the individuals who benefit from and lead this country’s universities, capital, and institutions. These same figures in tech then scoff at the suggestion that those same structures should serve Americans first.
Ankit Gupta is the son of an Indian family that made their life in the United States. He went through American schooling, studied computer science at Harvard, and did research in artificial intelligence there. He went on to co-found Reverie Labs, a biotech company that was accepted into Y Combinator and later acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks. Today, Gupta has returned to Y Combinator as a partner, placing him among the people who decide which entrepreneurs receive access to the same American venture capital ecosystem that propelled his own career.
Vice President JD Vance wrote that, “If an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans.” Ankit Gupta responded that this was “a win for the woke left” and that “DEI is back,” as if treating Americans as a preferred group were the scandal. For Gupta, treating American citizenship as a legitimate hiring consideration seems to be a point of contention. He argued that H-1B critics misunderstand the issue, claiming that the real alternative to hiring an H-1B worker is not an American getting the job, but the job leaving for Shanghai, Bangalore, or London. In Gupta’s telling, immigrants are willing to work longer hours and place greater emphasis on their children’s education, leaving Americans unable to compete for these positions. Gupta then asked his critics what they disliked about H-1B immigrant culture. One critic responded with a swipe at litter, dishonesty, and what he described as atrocious aesthetic taste. Gupta replied, “It’s giving flyover country.” The exchange reveals a striking hierarchy in Gupta’s worldview where the foreign worker is the real professional and the country’s interior—historically home to some of the finest engineers and scientists in world history—is a joke.
The disagreement between Vance and Gupta ultimately comes down to what America is. Is it a nation or is it simply a labor market? A labor market does not care who lives in the country; it only cares who will do the work for the cheapest price. If that person is on a visa, the market will take him. If the work can be done in Bangalore or Shanghai, the market sends it there. Gupta is consistent with that picture because he is describing a firm that owes nothing to a people. The government has a responsibility to consider the interests of its own citizens. American institutions should not treat the people who built and sustain them as interchangeable with labor anywhere else in the world. Gupta benefited from those institutions. so it is worth asking who built the ladder that he was able to climb.
When Gupta’s family arrived in America. they didn’t create this prosperity from nothing. They entered a country that already had property rights, research universities funded by American taxpayers and donors, and a venture capital industry operating under laws that protect capital and entrepreneurship. Harvard itself is an American institution, endowed by American wealth and supported by a research ecosystem funded in significant part by federal dollars. Reverie Labs was built and acquired inside an American biotech market that depends on American regulators, hospitals, investors, and consumers. Gupta’s rise was possible because he entered a system whose institutions had been built and sustained by generations of Americans.
Once Gupta reached the top, he was no longer simply a beneficiary of the American institutions; he became one of the people who decide who gets access to them. From his position at Y Combinator, he helps select the next generation of founders and decide which entrepreneurs receive American capital and institutional support. His rhetoric suggests a system in which the American people who built those institutions have no greater claim on their opportunities than anyone else in the world. American universities educate the talent, Silicon Valley finances it, visas move it in, and the citizens who question the arrangement are dismissed as “flyover country.” Gupta has even encouraged Indian technical teams to apply to YC and promised that he would personally work to get them visas. That is not assimilation, but extraction with a pedigree. Take everything America’s institutions have to offer, then turn around and tell Americans they have no right to come first in their own country.
A country owes its citizens first claim on their own future. A family is not required to feed every child on the block before it feeds its own. Preferring your own is not hatred of the stranger but an ordinary loyalty without which a household collapses. America was not built to be a job application state for importing labor and treating its citizens as an inconvenience. The breakthroughs that made the technological age possible were done by Europeans and heritage Americans long before Silicon Valley became a global marketplace. Electricity, computer theory, vacuum tubes, transistors, mainframes were all achieved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before the Hart-Celler Act. America owes its citizens the right to live in what their predecessors constructed. Ankit Gupta’s comments expose the underlying reality of what happens when a country begins to think of its heritage as something to be sold.
