An American accountant makes $60,000 a year. A Fortune 500 company files an H-1B petition to import an accountant willing to do the same job for $45,000. Under the current system, that's not a loophole. That's the feature.
Vice President JD Vance just said out loud what the cheap labor lobby has spent billions making sure nobody in Washington ever says.
"My view is the H-1B program is completely broken, and I'd be very supportive of just eliminating it," Vance told conservative influencer Jack Posobiec in an interview reported by the Daily Wire. Not reforming it. Not tweaking the caps. Eliminating it.
The H-1B visa program caps admissions at 85,000 per year — 65,000 through the regular program and 20,000 for workers with advanced degrees. This year, 211,000 registrations flooded in for those 85,000 slots. The program was sold to the American public as a way to recruit irreplaceable genius-level talent. Vance made clear that's not what's happening.
"If you want to say, 'I'd like to bring a genius into the United States of America,' you can have that conversation," Vance said. "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."
The Trump administration has already been moving on enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security proposed a $103,265 fee per H-1B petition — a number designed to make companies think twice before filing paperwork to replace an American worker with a cheaper import. A federal judge blocked an earlier $100,000 fee. Another judge struck down a separate fee structure in June. DHS came back in August with the revised proposal.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler framed the fee as cost recovery: "The proposed H-1B fee is intended to recover the costs incurred across the federal government to adjudicate, vet, and support lawful immigration programs." That's the bureaucratic version. The plain English version is that if you want to use a government program to undercut American wages, the government is going to make it expensive.
Vance was blunt about why Congress never fixed this on its own. "Congress was not going to reform the H-1B program because unfortunately a lot of people were bought by the cheap labor lobby," he said. "Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent."
The timing matters. With midterms approaching, Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds in Florida and candidates across the country are running on economic populism. Vance's statement isn't a trial balloon. It's the administration planting a flag — legal immigration reform is on the table, and the program Silicon Valley depends on for discount labor is first in line.
Two hundred eleven thousand applications for 85,000 slots. The program was built for geniuses. It's being used for accountants making $45,000.