Vice President JD Vance said Thursday aboard Air Force Two that the H-1B program is completely broken and that he’d support eliminating it outright. The statement that hits the hardest is the one that deserves to: If you bring in a foreign accountant at $45,000 to replace an American accountant making $60,000, you are not importing a genius. You are destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people.
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
That fact does more work than a decade of white papers, because it exposes the gap between what the program was sold as and what it has become. H-1B was pitched to Congress as a narrow mechanism for recruiting talent the United States could not produce — the researcher, the specialist, the person whose skills genuinely do not exist in the domestic labor pool. Nobody objects to that. Vance said so explicitly: if you want to bring a genius into America, let’s have that conversation.
But that isn’t the conversation the program actually produces, and Vance’s choice of example matters. Not a chip designer. An accountant. The complaint has moved well past Silicon Valley into ordinary professional services, where the arbitrage is simple and the justification is threadbare. Firms aren’t claiming they can’t find Americans who can do the work. They’re claiming they can’t find Americans who’ll do it for less, which is a statement about the wage, not the skill.
The defenders have one argument left, and it’s the one they always use: the market should set prices for labor like anything else. Fine. Except this isn’t a market. It’s a federal program that creates a worker legally tethered to a sponsoring employer, which is precisely what suppresses wages. Take away the government’s thumb and the visa holder could switch jobs tomorrow for a raise. The program’s own design hands employers leverage no American worker has, then the beneficiaries invoke ‘the free market’ to defend and justify it.
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
Vance put the blame where it belongs: on Congress, which he said has been bought by the cheap labor lobby. He’s right, and the proof arrived the same week. The administration tried to price out abuse with a $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B petitions, and on Wednesday a federal judge in California blocked it on procedural grounds — the agencies hadn’t gone through formal rulemaking. That’s the ceiling on executive action. Executive actions get legally entangled and halted. Congressional lawmaking tends to hold up better.
Which is why the right answer isn’t only H-1B. Anyone serious about this also has to look at Optional Practical Training (OPT), which lets foreign graduates of U.S. colleges and universities work up to three years with no cap and no sponsorship, and at employment authorization for H-4 spouses. Those are the pipeline, and killing H-1B alone would leave them running.
This is what I keep pounding. Post this everywhere. There are bigger programs and loopholes that are more damaging than H1B. H1B is a red herring that the swamp is willing to sacrifice. You want to protect Americans, get rid of H-4, OPT, and PERM.
— Shu the Moody (@shuthemoody) October 2, 2026
Vance’s closing instruction was the correct one: Tell your congressman to fix this.
