Vivek Ramaswamy is a man of many hats. Republican presidential candidate. Businessman. Entrepreneur. Former President Donald Trump’s potential running mate. But there’s one part of his biography that he would perhaps rather not reveal, one he reportedly paid to have scrubbed from his Wikipedia page: past recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros fellowship.
That award is worth paying attention to, though, and not just because GOP voters would blanch at Ramaswamy’s connection to anything with “Soros” in the name. The bigger issue is that this critic of birthright citizenship benefited from a fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants.
The issue here is not hypocrisy. Lots of people, and certainly lots of politicians, are hypocrites.
Paul Soros is Hungarian born-billionaire philanthropist George Soros’ older brother. The two survived the Nazi occupation of (and Hungarian Arrow Cross regime in) Hungary, only for the country to find itself under communist rule. George left for London in 1947, making his way to the London School of Economics and, eventually, to Wall Street. Paul, an Olympic skier for the Hungarian national team, took a different route. In 1948 he defected in Switzerland while traveling with the team and made his way to the United States. In New York he met Daisy, a fellow Hungarian; she attended Columbia University on a student visa before marrying Paul.
Unlike his brother, Paul was not able to go to his preferred graduate school. And so, in the late 1990s, after making his money as an engineer and businessman and considering what to do with his fortune, he focused on immigrants and children of immigrants and helping them achieve their ambitions.
The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, per its website, was founded by the couple “to assist young New Americans at critical points in their education, which they felt was an unmet need. They also wished to call attention to the extensive and diverse contributions of New Americans to the quality of life in the United States.” So it was that Ramaswamy, whose family originated in Kerala, India, was awarded the fellowship in 2011 to support his studies at Yale Law School.
The issue here is not hypocrisy. Lots of people, and certainly lots of politicians, are hypocrites. Yes, Ramaswamy, the child of Indian immigrants, accuses some immigrants of carrying out an invasion against the United States, and yes, as president he would make it more difficult for children of immigrants born here to participate in the political process. It is true that a child of immigrants won’t necessarily feel one predetermined way about immigration, and we know that some immigrants feel that other, newer immigrants threaten the American way of life. But Ramaswamy goes a step beyond hypocrisy.
In 2010, Paul and Daisy Soros increased their endowment specifically to recognize more contributions by new Americans, “amid efforts they view as increasingly anti-immigrant,” The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. The next year, Ramaswamy participated in this program. Whether he would put it this way or not, he embraced and benefited from this ideology: that immigrants and their children contribute to this country; that they deserve opportunities to educate themselves; that what they give to American life needs to be recognized. He used that ideology for his own advancement, and then he became an ideologue in the other direction.
Perhaps the neatest parallel to Ramaswamy’s behavior is not any other American politician, but a leader an ocean away: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Perhaps the neatest parallel to Ramaswamy’s behavior is not any other American politician, but a leader an ocean away: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In 1984, George Soros began his philanthropic efforts in Hungary, guided by the vision of an “open society” he encountered studying under philosopher Karl Popper at LSE. In an open society, everyone can come together for discussion and debate with the hope of achieving a better understanding of how things should and could be, and their right to do that is not dictated by their ethnicity, religion, country of origin or anything else. One way Soros carried out this vision was by providing fellowships for students to study abroad. One of those students was Orban, who used the money to study at Oxford.
Again, the issue is not that Orban was once affiliated in some way with Soros and now bashes him. It is that he was a part of, and used, this worldview for his direct benefit. He, too, embraced this ideology. It was, and is, a part of his life. His policies today — anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-education — are all counter to those of the benefactor who believed in an open society that helped Orban study abroad.
It is important to see this not just as craven and hypocritical, but also as opportunistic. And the reason that that last point is important is this: The political and philanthropic project that presented Ramaswamy, like Orban, with the opportunity in question is not the one he is selling to voters. But that ideology can continue to offer other Americans similar opportunities for a better life — if they reject Ramaswamy’s attempt to close others off from a worldview that someone once made open to him.