Vice President JD Vance said on October 1 that the H-1B visa program is “completely broken” and that he would support eliminating it outright, intensifying a campaign against the white-collar visa system that has drawn support from both immigration hawks and some Silicon Valley investors.
“The H-1B program is completely broken, and I’d be very supportive of just eliminating it,” Vance said.
Chris Chmielenski, a founder of the Immigration Accountability Project, said Vance’s rising profile on the issue is deliberate. “He’s certainly trying to gain more attention to this,” Chmielenski said. “The vice president is a strong messenger for conservatives … [and] this would be a natural area for [Democrats] to also speak out on.”
Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, offered a similarly strong endorsement. “Vance could very well be the strongest vice president the country has ever had,” Lynn said. “He understands the impact of the visa programs; he understands the importance of putting America and Americans first.”
Fraud, Not Just Numbers
In an interview with Jack Posobiec on Human Events, Vance framed his objection around fraud rather than simple opposition to skilled immigration.
My belief on this is the H-1B program has been totally taken advantage of, not just by technology companies [but also] by accounting firms, by people who are basically defrauding the American worker. If you want to say, “Oh, 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.
That clip, reposted by Vance, drew more than four million views. Still, Vance acknowledged the limits of his office. “Tell your congressman to fix this program,” he said, adding, “Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent.”
The Scale of the Program
The H-1B program brings in roughly 120,000 workers annually and keeps about 900,000 foreign workers in U.S. jobs at any given time, a total that includes roughly 750,000 H-1B holders and at least 100,000 spouses. Other visa categories push the overall number of foreign contract workers in the U.S. to roughly 1.5 million.
At a mid-September All-In podcast event, investor David Sacks pressed Vance on fraud in the program. “We have learned that the program was riddled with fraud,” Sacks said. “What’s happening with that?”
Vance responded by describing the political terrain as narrow. “This [political compromise] is the Venn diagram overlap of [investor] Jason Calacanis and [Trump advisor] Stephen Miller — it’s a very small area,” he said, continuing:
Congress is not going to pass a law changing this — there just isn’t the political will to do it. So we’re doing a lot within the confines, of course, of what we’re allowed to do legally. We’ve gotten sued on some of this stuff, but I think fundamentally we’re on the right on both the law and the policy. The H-1B should not exist to replace American workers with low wage foreigners. It should exist to enrich the American economy, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to make sure it does.
This week the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission targeted Sibitalent Corp. over allegations it excluded an American worker from tech jobs. Separately, the Inspector General at the Department of Labor is investigating growing evidence of anti-American hiring practices at medical centers.
Pushback and Timeline
Vance’s push has drawn criticism from libertarians who argue he is interfering with employers’ ability to hire from a global labor pool, as well as from centrists who note the visa system was built to give large employers a market and political advantage over American white-collar workers.
Lynn said he hopes the administration moves faster than its own re-election timeline. “The question is, are we going to have to wait until 2029 to get a policy from this administration?” he said. “My hope is it will be in 2027 that we will either see significant reforms or the H-1B abolished.”
Lynn argued the visa system has reshaped the industry’s culture. “This Wild West has been replaced with a plantation system, where the few independents out there are really left trying to eke out an existence day to day, because major employers made damn sure to lock it all down for themselves,” he said. “They’re not going to allow a challenger to Google to come up, they’re not going to allow a challenger to Oracle to come up, and now they’re trying to control the AI space.”
Chmielenski said the issue carries higher stakes as artificial intelligence development accelerates. “It would be in the national interest for U.S.-based AI technology to be developed by American professionals who are 100 percent bought into the ideals of America, rather than foreign [visa] workers who have zero interest in the interest of America,” he said.
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