Far right activist Nick Fuentes dubs Vivek Ramaswamy 'anchor baby' claims he has 'no right to be here'

Far-right activist, Nick Fuentes, has launched a racist attack on Vivek Ramaswamy following the Republican leader’s recent New York Times op-ed, branding him an “anchor baby” and claiming he has “no right to be here,” reigniting a volatile debate over American identity, immigration, and race on the right.

Vivek Ramaswamy. the Indian-origin entrepreneur, former Republican presidential candidate, and conservative intellectual, published an opinion piece in The New York Times arguing that the United States is defined not by ancestry, but by shared civic values.



"Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation," he wrote in his op ed.




The argument drew swift backlash from the far right. Nicholas J. Fuentes, a white nationalist commentator, responded with a polarizing post on X.

“Reminder that Vivek Ramaswamy is an actual anchor baby, so everything he says can be completely disregarded,” Fuentes wrote. “Foreigners who have no right to be here don’t get to lecture me about what it is to be American.”

The term “anchor baby” is widely regarded as derogatory. It refers to a child born in a country that grants birthright citizenship, such as the United States, to non-citizen parents, implying the child exists primarily to secure legal status for the family. Ramaswamy was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, an engineer, and Geetha Ramaswamy, a geriatric psychiatrist, immigrated to the U.S. from Kerala, India.

In his op-ed, Ramaswamy directly challenged ideas gaining traction on parts of the far right. He criticized identity frameworks rooted in “lineage, blood and soil,” which he linked to white nationalist thinking. He also addressed the rise of the so-called “Groyper” movement, an online faction advocating a white-centric national identity.

That line, “either you’re an American or you’re not”, has drawn particular criticism online. Some immigrants and civil rights advocates described it as overly rigid and dismissive of the country’s pluralistic history.

One user wrote on social media: “Men like Vivek Ramaswamy have the logic where the entire world can become American based on vague principles. No, America is a distinct place, people, and culture, and it should remain that way.”

Another wrote, " people want to take the American high ground on Vivek they should at least have views that are more consistent with the founders than Vivek which just about no politician does, and ideally not be progressive era immigrants themselves."