A Silicon Valley investor sneered at American citizens on Wednesday, prompting quick pushback from the chairman of President Trump’s Federal Trade Commission and the investor’s politically minded boss.
“What elements of H1B immigrant culture do you not like? Is it the willingness to work long hours? Or perhaps the education focus of their children?” posted Ankit Gupta, who then used the term “flyover country.”
Gupta had earlier described Vice President Vance as “woke left” for his indirect criticism of the visa programs that dispalce American graduates. Gupta is a U.S.-born general partner at Y Combinator, which is a leading investment firm for emerging tech companies in Silicon Valley.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson responded to Gupta’s viral tweet with another viral tweet:
Y Combinator is a supposed champion of “Little Tech” but perhaps they’re nothing more than a front for the far left. I’m deeply uncomfortable with wealthy investors attacking American workers like this. I’m afraid it’s increasingly obvious to many people that individuals such as this guy do not have the best interests of America and her citizens in mind.
The purpose of the American economy is to promote the general welfare of American workers, not provide jobs for the rest of the world.
Ferguson’s jab was echoed in many responses — and it matches the growing push by many officials in Trump’s agencies — including Vice President JD Vance — to curb the displacement of Americans by cheap and subordinated white-collar visa workers.
Ferguson’s rebuke of Gupta was echoed by Gupta’s boss, Garry Tan, the Canadian-born president of Y Combinator, or “YC.”
“YC supports hiring and funding Americans,” said Tan, cryptically.
Tan was born in Canada. At age 11, his ethnic Chinese parents took him to Fremont, California, close to Silicon Valley. After a poor upbringing and good schooling, he graduated from Stanford University in 2003.
He describes himself as a moderate and has funded various political causes in California, including cheaper housing and stronger law enforcement. He is also a loud critic of establishment media sites, and a populist-themed zealot for technological advances.
The New York Times reported in March 2024:
Despite his online bravado, Mr. Tan, who says he is a moderate Democrat, wants three not-exactly-radical changes to San Francisco: a beefed-up police force with more power to combat the city’s property crime epidemic and anti-Asian violence, a thriving public school district that pushes students academically, and more housing for people of all income levels in a city struggling with tent encampments and a disappearing middle class.
[…]
He grew outraged that the city’s school board was spending its time debating whether to rename 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln High, rather than pushing to get students back inside them. The school district kept children home on Zoom longer than the vast majority of districts in the country while private school students, like his own, were back in their classrooms months earlier.
He also was incensed by the killing of two women in a downtown crosswalk on New Year’s Eve 2020, struck by a man driving a stolen car. The driver had a long criminal history and had been repeatedly arrested and then released in fall 2020 by the office of Chesa Boudin, the district attorney at the time.
Tan is also a prominent opponent of California’s pending wealth-tax amendment, which threatens to heavily tax investors to fund the Democratic Party’s political machine in California.
Tan has repeatedly admitted problems in the counterproductive H-1B visa program, which has crippled many companies.
“H1B reform is needed because IT consultancies abuse the visa. Tech people do get this,” he posted in December 2024 when Elon Musk was denouncing critics of the federal government’s cheap-labor program for investors.
He posted:
High skilled is founders, AI researchers … There is a pretty clear case for cutting IT consulting and rote level software engineering abuse of the H1B
But he also called for an end to the diversity rules — sometimes called the “country cap” — that are intended to prevent migrants from one country hogging the annual distribution of roughly 140,000 employer-sponsored green cards. Roughly 1 million Indian visa workers have crowded into a traffic jam at the federal office because companies issue far more green-card sponsorships than the government can distribute.
Removing the diversity rule would be difficult, partly because it would quickly grant green cards — and then citizenship — to more than 1 million Democratic-aligned Indians now working in the H-1B, L-1, OPT, and J-1 visa programs. The goal is also a top priority for India’s government as it tries to maximize its political influence in the United States.
The rising American demand to curb white-collar migration is flipping many influencers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Investor Palmer Luckey told Gupta that Americans can fill the H-1B jobs:
Luckey also shut down a defense of the H-1B program by a pro-Indian advocate:
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