The H-1B visa program “should not exist to replace American workers,” Vice President JD Vance said in a video message Sunday.
In a video posted to X, Vance spoke about how the Trump administration has been investigating fraud within the H-1B visa program, and that one of the ways the Trump administration is trying to change it is by imposing a $100,000 per-worker fee on companies replacing American workers with foreign workers.
Vance explained that the administration has been asking what they “can do administratively to ensure” that if tech companies are trying to hire foreign workers on H-1B visas it is because the person is “an actual genius” who will enrich the United States, and not to just hire a foreign worker who will make less.
“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,” Vance said. “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.”
Vance shared that “one of the things” he finds shocking is that companies will apply for H-1B visas and claim to be “desperate for workers,” but an investigation into their history will show they have laid off thousands of American workers.
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“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,” Vance said. “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.”
“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,” Vance added in the video.
Breitbart News reported in August, that the Trump administration announced that it would impose a $103,265 fee “for each of the 85,000 H-1B workers annually imported by companies”:
The proposed change comes as President Donald Trump needs to rebuild public support before the November election. Companies now employ at least 730,000 non-immigrant H-1B contract workers in jobs needed by American college graduates, helping to spike the unemployment and underemployment rates for computer science graduates up to 26 percent.
In response to the announcement, Vance supported the fee, stating that “if an American corporation need workers, it should hire and train Americans.”
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