Vice President JD Vance said Thursday he would support eliminating the H-1B visa program, calling it “completely broken” and accusing employers of using it to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor.
“My view is the H-1B program is completely broken, and I’d be very supportive of just eliminating it,” Vance said. “But while we have it, what we have to do is protect American workers. So I understand people are annoyed. What I would say is tell your congressman to fix this program.”
In an interview with conservative influencer Jack Posobiec aboard Air Force Two, Vance said the program has been “totally taken advantage of,” not only by technology companies but also by accounting firms and other employers.
“If you want to say, ‘I’d like to bring a genius into the United States of America,’ you can have that conversation,” Vance said. “But if you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who’s an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius.”
“That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people,” he added.
The controversial H-1B program allows U.S. employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in specialty occupations and has become a political flashpoint in recent years over the scope of legal immigration. Vance defended the administration’s efforts to curb what it describes as abuse, while accusing Congress of failing to act.
“Congress was not going to reform the H-1B program because unfortunately a lot of people were bought by the cheap labor lobby,” he told Posobiec. “Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent.”
The administration’s efforts have faced legal setbacks. On Wednesday, a second federal judge blocked federal agencies from enforcing the $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, finding that federal agencies had failed to follow the standard rulemaking process. Another judge struck down the fee in June, and it has remained blocked while the administration appeals.
That ruling concerns a fee imposed through a presidential proclamation, separate from an additional $103,265 fee the Department of Homeland Security proposed in August through the regulatory process.
The August proposal would require employers to pay $103,265 for each H-1B petition subject to the annual cap, including petitions for workers with advanced degrees from American universities. The fee would add to existing H-1B filing fees, The Daily Wire reported.
“The proposed H‑1B fee is intended to recover the costs incurred across the federal government to adjudicate, vet, and support lawful immigration programs that otherwise must be funded by taxpayers,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler said.
The proposed charge would also apply to all cap-subject petitions, including those seeking to change the status of foreign students and workers already legally in the U.S. to H-1B.
The H-1B program is capped at 85,000 new visas annually — 65,000 under the regular program and 20,000 for workers with advanced U.S. degrees. Certain employers are exempt from those limits. Demand regularly exceeds the cap, triggering an annual lottery. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported it received more than 211,000 registrations for the most recent lottery.
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