Vance Says He’d Support Eliminating H-1B Visa Program Entirely

Vice President JD Vance said this week he would support eliminating the H-1B visa program altogether, calling it “completely broken” and accusing employers of using it to undercut American workers’ wages.

“My view is the H-1B program is completely broken, and I’d be very supportive of just eliminating it,” Vance said Thursday during an interview with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec aboard Air Force Two.

Vance drew a distinction between recruiting exceptional foreign talent and using the visa program to replace American employees with cheaper labor.

“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,” he said. “That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people.”

Vance said the abuse isn’t limited to the tech industry, arguing accounting firms and other employers have also “totally taken advantage of” the system. He placed blame on Congress for failing to act, saying lawmakers have been influenced by what he called the “cheap labor lobby.”

“Congress was not going to reform the H-1B program because unfortunately a lot of people were bought by the cheap labor lobby,” Vance said. “Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent.”

Vance has kept a high public profile as vice president. He recently campaigned in Florida, where he was confronted by hecklers but also drew the familiar “USA” chants that have become a feature of Trump-era rallies.

A Policy Fight Already in Court

The Trump administration has separately moved to make H-1B visas more costly to discourage misuse. President Trump imposed a $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B petitions through a presidential proclamation, but the policy has hit a legal obstacle. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. blocked federal agencies from enforcing the fee, ruling that the administration had not followed required rulemaking procedures.

Vance’s remarks have also fueled debate over whether H-1B is the right target at all. Some critics argue that other programs — including H-4 employment authorization for spouses of certain H-1B holders, and Optional Practical Training (OPT) for international students — represent a bigger piece of the foreign-labor pipeline.

H-4 status allows spouses and children of certain H-category visa holders to live in the U.S., though work authorization for spouses is generally limited to cases where the H-1B holder has reached specific stages of the employment-based green card process. OPT, meanwhile, is not a separate visa but a work authorization tied to F-1 student status. It allows up to 12 months of employment after graduation, with STEM graduates eligible for a 24-month extension — potentially up to three years of work authorization before an employer ever files for an H-1B.

That overlap is why some critics argue eliminating H-1B alone wouldn’t resolve the broader dispute over foreign labor competing with American workers, since OPT and H-4 authorization can keep foreign graduates and spouses in the workforce independent of the H-1B program itself.

A Decade-Old Promise

Concerns about H-1B displacing American workers are not new to the Trump political orbit. In a March 2016 campaign statement, Trump accused companies of importing temporary foreign workers “for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” and said, “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program,” promising an “absolute requirement to hire American workers first.”

That same night, during a Republican primary debate, Trump had said he was “softening” his stance on H-1B because the country needed to retain highly skilled graduates, before his campaign statement returned to a harder line. Once in office, he signed the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, calling for H-1B visas to favor the “most-skilled and highest-paid applicants.”

Vance’s comments suggest he is prepared to go further than past administration policy by scrapping the program outright if Congress won’t fix it. “I understand people are annoyed,” Vance said. “What I would say is tell your congressman to fix this program.”