America’s H-1B visa program comes out of a desire to better America: to allow foreigners with highly specialized skill sets and unique knowledge to come and work, then return home.
It’s deteriorated over the years, however, and now is used thousands of times a year by corporations who want to fire an American worker, and replace him or her with a lower-paid foreigner.
And Vice President JD Vance says enough is enough.
“My view is the H-1B program is completely broken,” he has said.
Vice President Vance on the Trump Administration’s H1B visa reforms:
“The H-1B should not exist to replace American workers with low-wage foreigners. It should exist to enrich the American economy.” pic.twitter.com/7bunZ97u5Z
— Vice President JD Vance (@VP) September 27, 2026
Vice President JD Vance on H1-B visas:
“If you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who is 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… pic.twitter.com/2yhrBzrnT8
— Vice President JD Vance (@VP) October 1, 2026
Vance: “If you are trying to undo 40 years of globalization, it’s going to take time to fix that. You have a few tone deaf Republicans who say, ‘Shut up if you’re pissed off about a $22 burrito.’ My response to that is… No. Listen to people who are upset with the state of the… pic.twitter.com/byvNSvpUFo
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) October 1, 2026
A report at the Federalist explains, “In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act reorganized the American immigration system over President Harry Truman’s overridden veto. Among the features of the new law was a provision allowing for the temporary entry of ‘an alien having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning … who is of distinguished merit and ability and who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform temporary services of an exceptional nature requiring such merit and ability.'”
The report said, “The thing we know as the H-1B visa was born in that definition, and you can see the implication: America was opening its doors to the finest minds in the world, allowing brilliance to flow to our shores. How could we turn away the extraordinary gifts of the German physicist, the deep skill of the Scandinavian chemist, the exquisite professional expertise of the Taiwanese materials engineer?”
Instead, the reality is, the report said, “The H-1B visa has become a pipeline to India for cheap software guys, sitting under fluorescent lights in Palo Alto and fixing the glitches on the app you just used to order a burrito delivery.”
Analysts have confirmed that, “On average, H-1B workers earn 16 percent less than comparable natives,” which means corporations cut a lot of salary spending when they get rid of the American worker and replace him or her with someone from India.
Last year, the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on many new H-1B visas, though the collection of that fee has been blocked by federal judges, the report said.
At RedState was the explanation that Vance would be “very supportive of just eliminating it.”
“If you want to say, ‘I’d like to bring a genius into the United States of America,’ you can have that conversation. 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 said, “Congress was not going to reform the H-1B program because unfortunately a lot of people were bought by the cheap labor lobby. Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent.”
The report noted other “foreign-worker” programs drawing attention now include the H-4 employment scheme and the Optional Practical Training racket.
“H-4 is a dependent status available to spouses and children of certain H-category visa holders. H-4 children cannot simply work because of that status, and employment authorization for spouses is limited to certain cases, principally families whose H-1B worker has reached particular stages of the employment-based green-card process. OPT, meanwhile, isn’t a separate visa. It allows eligible F-1 students to work temporarily in jobs related to their field of study. Standard OPT can provide up to 12 months of employment authorization, while qualifying STEM graduates can receive a 24-month extension, potentially allowing up to three years of work authorization,” the report said.
President Donald Trump has threatened to “end forever” the use of H-1B’s “cheap labor program.”
