Vice President JD Vance said the H-1B visa program should never replace American workers, backing a six-figure fee on firms that swap U.S. talent for cheaper foreign labor.
In a Sunday video message, Vance drew a hard line on who the specialty-worker program is for and who it is not. He said the Trump administration is probing fraud inside H-1B and weighing administrative steps to stop companies from using the visas as a layoff tool.
The core point was simple. The program, he argued, exists to bring in rare talent that lifts the American economy, not to undercut paychecks at home.
Breitbart News reported Vance’s remarks and his support for a steep per-worker fee on companies that replace Americans with foreign hires.
Vance put the purpose in plain English.
"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"
He said the standard should be “an actual genius,” not a cheaper stand-in for work Americans already do.
Vance zeroed in on a pattern he called shocking. A firm applies for H-1B visas and insists it cannot find workers. Then the record shows large domestic layoffs.
"One of the things that I find just shocking about this is, you’ll have a company that applies for an H-1B, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, we’re desperate for workers, we can’t find the workers.’ And, then you go and look at their history, and they’ve laid off 5,000 people"
His verdict followed without hedging.
"Well, that’s ridiculous. If you’re laying off American workers, you shouldn’t be going to the market searching for foreign workers to replace them."
That is the accountability test the administration is pushing: match a company’s H-1B claims against its recent layoff history, and close the gap when the two stories do not line up.
Vance described a $100,000 per-worker fee on companies that replace American workers with foreign ones. He framed it as something the administration “can do administratively to ensure” the program serves its real purpose.
He used a concrete wage example to show what replacement looks like on the ground.
"You know, you’re not just replacing one accountant who makes $60,000 with a lower wage foreign accountant who makes $45,000 a year"
Then he closed the loop.
"That is not what the program exists for. And, so we came up with this idea to impose a $100,000 fee. We’re also looking at various ways of preventing companies that use H-1B visas from laying off a bunch of American workers."
Earlier, in August, Breitbart reported a related Trump administration announcement of a $103,265 fee for each of the 85,000 H-1B workers companies import each year. Vance backed that approach. He has also said that if an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans.
The numbers attached to the debate are large. Reporting cited in the package put at least 730,000 non-immigrant H-1B contract workers on company payrolls. The annual cap figure tied to the fee announcement was 85,000 new H-1B workers a year.
At the same time, unemployment and underemployment rates for computer science graduates have been reported as high as 26 percent. That is the backdrop Vance is speaking into: a program sold as a fix for scarce high-skill labor, running alongside soft demand for new American graduates in the same fields.
The administration’s stated aim is twofold. Investigate fraud in how firms use H-1B. And redesign incentives so the visa cannot function as a quiet pipeline for lower-wage replacement after domestic cuts.
Vance’s Sunday message did not name individual companies in the layoff example. It did set a rule of thumb any voter can follow. If you just cut thousands of American jobs, you do not get to plead a worker shortage to the immigration system.
American workers should not have to compete with a visa loophole designed to cheapen their labor. A program that enriches the country starts by putting them first.
