Making her debut Wednesday at the Republican National Convention, Usha Chilukuri Vance spoke with pride about her Indian immigrant parents. But viewers on social media are criticizing her for what they see as a stark contradiction: the heavily anti-immigrant sentiment that pervaded the audience she was speaking to.
“Usha Vance talking about being a daughter of immigrants as the mostly white people at the RNC hold ‘Mass Deportations Now’ signs is quite the scene,” one person tweeted.
Throughout the evening, blue and red signs peppered the convention floor, reading “Mass Deportations Now” Audible chants of “Send them back” also reverberated multiple times when politicians like Usha Vance’s husband, former president Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance, spoke about “illegal aliens” entering the country.
Experts said this dichotomy affirms a long drawn-upon strategy on the right.
“There are good immigrants and there are bad immigrants,” said Pawan Dhingra, a professor of American studies at Amherst College. “And the Republican Party is just trying to embrace, quote unquote, ‘good immigrants.’”
During her speech, Usha Vance touched on her upbringing and how it stood in contrast to her husband’s.
“My background is very different from JD’s. I grew up in San Diego, in a middle-class community, with two loving parents, both immigrants from India, and a wonderful sister,” she said. “That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country.”
She said JD adapted to her vegetarian diet, and even learned how to cook Indian food for her parents. “It’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American Dream,” she said.
During his speech Wednesday night, businessman and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy invoked his family’s immigrant story as well — paired with a much clearer message about those who are undocumented.
“Our message to every legal immigrant in this country is this: You’re like my parents,” he said. “You deserve the opportunity to secure a better life for your children in America. But our message to illegal immigrants is also this: We will return you to your country of origin.”
Dhingra said this rhetoric is especially harmful when it’s espoused by children of immigrants themselves like Ramaswamy and Usha Vance, as it serves to drive a wedge between communities of color whose stories aren’t so different.
“Immigrants generally speaking come to the United States to find work and/or safety, as well as to reunite with family,” he said. “The government puts limits on how many people can come in legally. Those limits are arbitrary. If the need of employers for immigrant workers surpasses those limits, then in some ways it’s the government that has created undocumented immigration. So, this binary of good immigrants and bad immigrants doesn’t make sense.”
When asked to weigh in on the criticism, the Vance team sent a response from Jai Chabria, a JD Vance adviser and friend of the family.
“White liberals attacking a successful brown woman with such vitriol is exactly why the Democrats are bleeding so many minority voters right now,” he said.
Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung also said the criticism was unwarranted.
“It is disgusting that out-of-touch liberals and far-left media lose their minds and self-implode when faced with a wildly successful diverse figure who they think should be blindly aligned with them,” he said.
At a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week, JD Vance cited immigration as one of the foremost causes of financial hardship in the U.S., including immigrants at large who are taking jobs from American citizens.
These stances and the larger political transformation of the vice presidential pick place him at odds with the immigrant family story of his wife, experts say.
“‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ was trying to speak to the decline or concerns of white, rural Americans, who have felt left behind,” Dhingra said. “The problem has been that Trump has taken those concerns and turned them into an approach that’s highly anti-immigrant. … [JD Vance] has played into a highly right-wing base, and that’s what earned him Trump’s support.”
But despite the speeches railing against undocumented immigrants, Trump’s time in office saw the curtailing of legal immigration pathways as well. Limits on high-skill work visas like H1Bs and green cards made it harder for foreign-born workers to enter and stay in the country. As a result, U.S. businesses lost employees, and some experts fear Trump will only double down in a second term.
Indian nationals, who make up nearly 75% of H1B petitioners, would be hit hard.
As one of the new faces of the MAGA movement, Usha Vance could have a unique role to play in the coming months when it comes to hedging these issues, Dhingra said.
“I think that having an Indian American Hindu wife will support the Republican Party’s rhetoric that they are not anti-immigrant,” he said. “They just want to make sure that immigrants come and ‘adapt’ to the country properly, and that they don’t threaten certain ways of life.”