WASHINGTON — Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy walked back his past support for foreign worker visas on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out Wednesday, saying the controversy is “irrelevant compared to our own deeper failure in education that we need to address.”
“I’m not afraid to start a conversation,” Ramaswamy declared to The Post’s Miranda Devine while discussing the explosive MAGA infighting he prompted in December 2024 over his initial stance in support of the H-1B program, which lets highly skilled foreign workers enter the US so long as companies sponsor them.
Following Trump’s election, the then-Department of Government Efficiency co-chair claimed “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” preferring “the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” and “the jock over the valedictorian.”
That’s allowed other countries like China to retain talented engineers while the US lost top recruits, he claimed.
Ramaswamy’s fellow DOGE co-chair Elon Musk also backed the H-1B program at the time.
President Trump announced last week that employers would now be made to pay $100,000 for each new H-1B applicant going forward.
Asked about H-1Bs in his “Pod Force One” interview, Ramaswamy sidestepped the controversy and said “a big part of that failure is the fact that our education system has fallen behind.”
“It’s a moral failure,” he said. “And if we really want to lead in those sectors of the future, what do I want for our economy? I want one where people who are born and raised in Ohio go on to achieve the maximum of their potential that they are the workers who are lifted up by a modern economy.”
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At the same time, Ramaswamy noted, Americans aren’t “doing everything that we should to elevate” educational standards.
“We have a lot of unity on the right, where we talk about the left’s rejection of excellence, the left’s rejection of American unity in favor of racial and identitarian division, gender, race, sexual orientation,” he went on, referencing “Woke Inc.,” a book he’d published in 2021 on the subject.
“I called that out because that was the threat to American exceptionalism,” he added.
Ramaswamy, who is currently the Republican frontrunner for the Ohio governorship, said that the US should be implementing “curricular enhancements” to counter its decades of decline in educational outcomes — with one option being the adoption of math standards used in Singapore.
“It’s a pretty darn good standard relative to what we get here in most of our public schools,” he claimed, while cautioning that “a lot of this is also something that’s got to start with the family. It’s not, ‘the government’s going to fix everything.’”
The system, in which students work with objects and visual models before progressing to abstract equations, was adopted by Singapore’s Ministry of Education in the 1980s and transformed their public schools’ performance.
“If you adopt Singapore math here, you do see improvements in academic standards,” he explained, “but not to the full extent that you see in Singapore. A big part of that is the family emphasis on education in Singapore as well.”
“I think we’re in need of a modern Apollo mission,” he added. “And I think elevating our educational achievement standards can be the modern Apollo mission of our time.”
“If we roll this forward 20 years, and our students are still four years behind China, five years behind Singapore, that will mark the end of American exceptionalism and greatness,” Ramaswamy warned, “unless we turn that ship around.”
Ramaswamy is leading the GOP field in the Buckeye State’s gubernatorial primary by double digits, per the RealClearPolitics polling average.
