US Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday said there was significant fraud within the H-1B visa system and credited the Donald Trump administration for carrying out a “massive” reduction in the number of fraudulent H-1B visas and asylum cases.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve done in the Trump administration. Massive reductions in fraudulent visas, massive reductions in fraudulent number of asylum cases, massive reductions in H-1B visas granted. We’re making a lot of progress,” said Vance at an event hosted by Turning Point USA, an influential conservative outfit targeting young voters.
Vance has been a vocal supporter of the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict legal immigration, including through the $100,000 H-1B visa application fee introduced in late 2025.
“When you guys graduate from this university, I don’t want you competing with a low wage foreigner for your first job. I want a company to pay you a fair wage for a fair day’s work. It’s common sense. But to do that you really have to do reform of the H-1B system. It’s not just the H-1B. It’s a lot of other visa systems,” Vance added.
The vice president underscored that the present visa system largely benefited major technology companies, a critique Vance has made several times in the past. In July 2025, Vance took issue with Microsoft’s application for thousands of H-1B visas in the midst of mass layoffs.
“Why have we worked without the help of Congress to restrict H-1B visas? Because we believe it is wrong for companies to bypass American labour just to go for cheaper options in the third world,” Vance told the TurningPoint USA’s AmericaFest convention in December last year.
On Wednesday, Vance also referred to his family background when questioned by an Indian-origin student about long delays faced by her family in getting a Green Card.
“You heard me talk about H-1B fraud, because I think there is a lot of fraud in the H-1B system. And I think you can believe on the one hand that there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system while also believing that there are people who have come to the United States in the past who have enriched this country. And look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants from India. And you know, I love my in-laws and they’re great people. And they’ve been great contributors to the United States of America,” said Vance.
“But one of the obligations of citizens is that you have to think about the best interest of the country and not the country you came from beforehand and not of any sort of any group that you came from. You’ve got to think of yourself as an American. The system only works if everybody thinks of themselves as an American,” the Vice-President added, referring to the example of his father-in-law Krish Chilukuri.
Vance, who is widely expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2028 elections, is far from the only critic of the H-1B programme.
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis directed state universities to stop using H-1B visas while conservative politicians in Washington – including Representatives Beth Van Duyne and Chip Roy – have suggested ending the program altogether. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin also introduced legislation to toughen enforcement of visa rules and limit eligibility rules for the H-1B visa.
However, President Donald Trump has at times expressed guarded support for some forms of legal immigration.
When asked if America had the required skilled talent at home in a television interview earlier in 2025, Trump stated: “No, you don’t, no you don’t. You don’t have certain talents and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles.