Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to help lead a government-efficiency initiativeps88, 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.

Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.

Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.ps88

• What
• of
• ps88
• Vivek
• Ramaswamy