Tech Investor Mocks Vance’s Call to Hire Americans as ‘DEI’, Gets Blasted by Trump Officials in H-1B Firestorm

Ankit Gupta, a general partner at the influential Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, drew criticism from Trump administration officials after mocking Vice President JD Vance’s call to prioritize American workers over hiring cheaper foreign labor.

The controversy began after the Trump administration proposed a $103,265 fee for many new H-1B visa petitions. As it stands, the H-1B visa program allows U.S. companies to hire foreign workers for specialty occupations and is overwhelmingly used by the tech industry.

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The proposed fee would make it costlier for American tech companies to rely on such labor and could give them an incentive to hire Americans instead, something Vance has emphasized repeatedly, such as when he recently declared, “If an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans.”

Gupta, who has since restricted his X posts from public access, mocked Vance, saying in purported screenshots, “In a win for the woke left DEI is back.”

Gupta’s comments comparing prioritizing American workers over foreign labor to DEI sparked a wave of criticism from several Trump administration officials and renewed a broader debate over H-1B visas, Silicon Valley hiring practices and whether American workers — particularly younger and entry-level tech workers — are being disadvantaged by companies’ reliance on foreign worker visa programs.

Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito replied, “Ankit Gupta thinks hiring Americans first — in America — is ‘DEI.’ No, Ankit. It’s called putting your own citizens first. American companies. American jobs. American workers first. If that offends you, the problem isn’t America. It’s your sense of entitlement.”

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson criticized Gupta’s rhetoric as part of a larger phenomenon of contempt for American workers.

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Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon also weighed in, sharing a lengthy post criticizing what she described as abuses of the H-1B program and other foreign worker programs.

“Our federal (and most state) employment laws mandate a level playing field for American workers vis-à-vis foreigners — yet many American tech (and other) companies prefer to hire cheaper/exploitable foreign workers to do routine jobs Americans could do, and they do this by failing to post jobs on their normal hiring channels (PERM violations), letting foreign-born hiring managers pipeline cheap foreign labor from body-shop mills over American workers (H1-B abuses), lie about their eligibility for no-cap H1-B hiring, abuse other visa categories such as J-1 visas (we see you, universities!), abuse OPT hiring to get cheap, exploitable foreign labor, and sometimes — getting super arrogant, gaslight laid-off and sidelined Americans while doing any of the above,” she wrote.

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