Op-ed: Can the Dems Outflank Trump on Immigration?
By Mark Krikorian on November 18, 2025
The governor’s race in the red state of Ohio is a toss-up, according to the latest polls. The primaries aren’t until May, but the presumptive nominees for the November general election are Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.
I don’t know enough about the state’s politics to place Acton on a spectrum, but she led the state’s COVID response, and her website hits the usual Democratic messages: “reproductive freedom”, unions, education, and health care.
But starting last week, she’s been alluding to a less predictable issue: the H-1B visa program.
The H-1B visa is an increasingly unpopular foreign-worker scheme, ostensibly intended to bring in high-skilled workers, but in fact providing cheap, controllable white-collar foreign workers, mostly to IT.
Acton hasn’t specifically come out and said she’s against the H-1B racket, but she’s been hitting Ramaswamy for his defense of importing foreign workers, which he justified back in December by saying American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long”, as exemplified by the fact that young people didn’t root for the nerdy characters in 1990s sitcoms.
Acton has naturally turned that into a message that Ramaswamy thinks “Ohioans aren’t succeeding because they’re lazy and mediocre and watching too much TV.”
https://cis.org/Krikorian/Oped-Can-Dems-Outflank-Trump-Immigration
